Six Strategies of Community Change, Checkoway 1995

Very reputable author-many articles/books to his credit, spanning a long life dedicated to community change.  Seems contrived at times to make the 6 distinctions. At the end he acknowledges there are combinations that are effective.  Throughout he frequently voices the worry of co-optation (though he never uses that word)-that organizers will work so well with powerful interests they will be drawn into the power-holding side. And he fears retaliation for actions that are militant.

VIP: community is a unit of solution. "The" unit for the larger social problems. But wait-small communities cannot be the unit of solution for things like globalization-Unless it is the community of the masters of the universe (!). The pals at Goldman-Sachs that are now completely running the US govt (as per Michael Moore's thesis of Capitalism: A love story.)

Back to community as the unit of solution. "a process through which people take initiative and act collectively."  The story of Oz: wouldn't we give up hope in people if we didn't believe that people actually have great resources within themselves (lion had courage all along). If we do not believe people have great resources within-then no use trying to awaken and organize them.  But then what is the role of the organization like the Trust or ELC-funders basically, not organizers?

Trying to get Checkoway's definitions:

"Empowerment as a multi-level process which includes individual involvement, organizational development, and community change."  Links straight to the Prilleltensky premise of our SPEC class: individual, organizational, community.  Checkoway: organizations as the structures that mediate between the individual and community and facilitate the collective action of community change.  This to me is a very critical framing of the 3 levels of individual, organization, community.  Here may be some guidance for my worry that the SPEC imperative to transform our organizations to achieve community change is missing the mark.  The organizational development Checkoway envisions is to organize the individuals in a way that challenges are addressed/resolved by the individuals affected. The organization mediates between the individual and the community.  For the Trust, we may fund organizations that mediate between affected (afflicted?) individuals and a communal solution-but our organization rarely mediates between individuals and community solutions.  The people that make up the Trust as an organization are not the individuals that may need to be mobilized to organize to achieve a communal solution; we have peripheral interest in a variety of social problems, but we as staff are not direct actors in problem resolution.

            Maybe I am looking for too-direct a relationship of individual to problem.  For the Trust's major initiatives there is one or more staff who serve as point person who hopefully is a specialist in the territory and has a direct involvement in getting services designed in a way that involves many stakeholders-but often it is the agencies (organizations) that the Trust funds who do this active organizing work. So in that sense doubt we can establish a direct link to community solutions from individual Trust staff and Trust organizational structure.

I had thought of all 6 of his strategies as the 2^nd one: Social action.  His definition: "aims to create change by building powerful organizations at the community level."  I think there is a big issue of "which community?'  Back to how to address globalization via community (as the unit of solution).  I'm thinking these 6 strategies are different ways of defining "community" for different processes (and maybe different purposes).  His Baltimore example seems to spread to other strategies-they did not stop at "conflict tactics," but went on to build services and seemed to have "citizen participation" as well. Citizen participation: create services, implement-generally with govt funding.

"Pluralist theory"-what is that? New term I want to explore.  I often speak of our society/culture as pluralistic-didn't even know there is a theory.

Very intriguing discussion of participation not as decentralization of govt power, but of de-concentration. Central agencies de-concentrate functions of services to local subareas-actually another form of centralization.  I think of the local Early Learning Coalitions formed by statute to be responsible for local activities of the child care block grant and ostensibly the child care system.  However, the state agency AWI still calls the shots; requires its approval of each local Plan and of all policy changes. De-concentrate.

Public advocacy-Checkoway implies that advocates are not organizers.  However, to achieve advocacy goals, a strong organization or coalition of organizations is needed.  That seems why child care may finally be getting somewhere in FL-the building of a strong coalition of various child advocacy organizations together for unified "public advocacy."  He identifies the criticism that advocates are not "of" the client community and don't consult with them or involve them in identifying issues and advocating for themselves. This may be said of the child care group emerging. This I find salient --and refer to the reading about the 4-letter SMO (SOMO?) that the strongest advocacy organizations are also service organizations.

Popular education. Pedegogy of the Oppressed revived: alter consciousness from conforming to reforming to transforming society.  "The idea is that the answers lie in the experience and imagination of people as communities rather than as individuals."  --I thought this was the premise of all community organizing-Checkoway's point on it though is that you can't stop with the education step-raised consciousness is not enough.

Local services:  key problem is that local activities have difficulty influencing the larger context in which they operate. This takes me again to the question: which community is the unit of solution?  "The major forces affecting local communities are not local but largely social, political, and economic in the larger society."  Here is where an organization like the Trust or the Early Learning Coalition has a prayer of effectiveness, because of big enough swath.

What has been developing in the last 15-20 years? Article from 1995, and no references after 1990.

Prilleltensky and Nelson textbook on Community Psychology chapters 8-9

(would have liked the title, authors, and date to show on the PDF provided)

SMO: Social Movement Organization- authors refer to the women's movement and the disability rights movement. For NGO: non-governmental organizations authors refer to Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Children's Defense Fund (I have been wondering what NGOs really are--).

Compelling rant about globalization: "the common name for the influence of corporations and the IMF on governments." But nothing to go with it-jumped without segue to the role of community psychologists. Where CPs "can nibble at the conventions of ameliorative interventions and push the envelope towards more transformative ways"-Nibble?  A sad report later in the chapter is that of many interventions studied, none really got past the ameliorative to be transformative.

Says that CP work is hard because "most societal structures reflect and reproduce inequality." Why?! Are humans hard-wired to inequality? To care for me before us? 

Role of the Community Psychologist-could be so much more understandable if examples were given.  Seems like a lengthy litany of things that might could be, with little development and little reality backing it up.  There is value in the "survey" or situation "scan" presented. Covers a lot of ground, giving a broad brush presentation of many possibilities for social change.  (references were not included in the PDF provided-these generally hold the key to much of the value of such a survey)

I take issue with the treatment of the women's movement in the past tense-as if it is over? And here is an example of my reading so much of these chapters as mere platitudes:  "Such collective action fostered a new way of life, a new way of relating, and a new way of being in the world."  I find contradiction in this over-simplification of such a huge movement as "the women's movement"-that is intimately linked (to my perspective) with the civil rights movement and the GLBT movement. The fabulous list at the chapter end of 5 classic resistance texts begins with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In the spirit of that work one could never state that today we have achieved "a new way of being in the world"-we are still working hard for that to be reality on the planet.

A critical perspective is added by Meg Bond in the commentary on Ch 9, the section "Beware of Illusions" where she identifies that "the illusion of participation and power sharing can actually further silence those who feel they are not being heard. There can be a sort of mystification born of their sense that they do not see any clear structural barrier to their participation, and thus blame themselves for not having more influence. It is important to avoid idealizing an absence of differentiated roles." Bond places this in the well-known analysis of the feminist movement as masking differences in power by organizing itself as a collective (Freemen 1972).  I take Bond's point this way: As a SPEC guinea-pig, I can see some of this "illusion" making our organizational work at TCT difficult.  There doesn't seem to be any stated obvious barrier to participation of staff at any level of the organization.  Yet no miracles are forthcoming. I have a sense of needing to "blame myself" for not being smart enough, articulate enough, master of networking enough to contribute to actual change.

"Community well-being is predicated on emancipation from oppressive forces."-and?? (easier said than done--)

Ch 9 mixes organizational and community interventions.  Is there guidance here for us SPEC students?  Point stated is that resources held by organizations are needed to change communities.  This I understand very differently from the Checkoway treatment that I understand as needing to have affected individuals involved in creating community change.  The Trust has resources, and we make decisions about the distribution of these resources. So to make good decisions we need to be staffed with very aware people who understand well the (likely) causes of afflictions and have a usable analysis of what interventions will make a positive difference. That may well require skills of Community Psychologists-as well as people well-versed in the history of how a problem got to be and what sort of interventions have been tried before (reflecting my historian training as an undergrad I suppose)

I wish I could get more from Table 9.1. In the text the word Outcomes are used though not heading the Table.  The lists are under-developed, not fleshed out, unable to transfer the author's meaning.  Here too it would be so helpful to have examples, stories to illustrate the transformative outcomes hoped-for. Table 9.3 (Emotional Competencies - Transformational Potential) suffers from the same lack of tie to real examples. Listing things is far from bringing them to life with descriptors and examples. The survey-listing leaves us wanting more: "Now that we know what emotional competencies are needed to foster and sustain change in organizations, we can use them to make progress through the different stages of change." How??  And then we get Table 9.4 Steps for organizational change. I really believe our SPEC class, and perhaps the new CP program, needs much deeper study of organizational culture, organizational management, and learning organization theory.

IVALUEIT (earlier book) here is IVALPRT (there is a limit to menomics)