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Week 9: Community Organizing - Coggle Diagram
Week 9: Community Organizing
Too often, participatory practice is enacted in a utilitarian way, with the focus largely on the lay actors and targets of health promotion
More effective methods meet people where they are at
The onus should be on the health promoter to listen respectfullly, and engage in critical reflection.
Participation is political, not procedural.
A rubric for participator practice includes 1) listening to stories, 2) engaging in respectful dialogue and 3) engaging in critical reflexivity.
Participation within a neoloberal context is challenging as it sees the individual as a singular consumer - not as a collective society.
There are 2 important theories community organising:
The Alinsky Tradition of Community Organizing
The organiser is one who agitates, listens to the concerns of the people and then mobilizes them.
An oganizer must have legitimacy in the community.
Some issues are better to tackle with community organizing than others. A good issue is simple, specific and winnable. A winable issue has a specific target (an org. or individual) with power to make change. This model suggests personalising and politisizing the target.
Alinsky reccomends creating a disatisfaction with the status Quo
This model does not adequately build local capacity and leadership or directly confront issues of race and racism.
The Freire Model of community organizing
This approach "begins with people's experiences. it gives them the tools to analyse their situation and take action to transform themselves and their confitions"
Grounded in liberation education where groups come ogether in culture circles to listen to each other, engage in dialogue about the struggles in their lives and historical roots of those struggles, employ collective actions to promote change. This process can be summarized as "listening, dialogue, action, reflection"
Participation is a fundamental principle that goes to the core of the democratic and social justice ethos of health promotion.
Participation is a mindset - we participate in the world ecologically, organically and holistically
participation makes us see health promotion as a matter of relational and cyclical processes
Incorporation of Indigenous ways of knowing.
Without participation, we miss out on layers of complexity, and may not get to the root cause.
Community organization began as a social work effort to coordinate services for newly arrived immigrants and poor individuals.
It has since broadened to broad social change objectives like the women's moveent, LGBT organising, disability rights, rights of immigration, etc.
In health, community participation became more populat in 1986 when WHO stressed the importance of increasing people's control over the determinants of their healt, high level of participation, etc.
Community based participatory research has brought community organizing into more domains.
Concepts in Community Organization and Community Building Practice
Empowerment as a process and action providing community members with greater social power
Critical Conciousness that encourages reflection and action in order to engage people in dialogue linking root causes and community action
Community Capacity affects communities ability to identify, mobilize, and address problems in order to increase participation and access to power
Issue Selection identifes winnable and specific targets that unify and build community straenth in order to decide targets as part of a larger strategy
Participation and Relevence says that community organizing should start where the people are and engage with people as equals in order to allow for the creation of a shared agenda based on felt needs, shared power and awareness of resources.