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HSCI 855 - Week 9: Community Organizing and Advocacy - Coggle Diagram
HSCI 855 - Week 9: Community Organizing and Advocacy
Participation is a fundamental principle at the core of democratic and social justice ethos of health promotion.
a. Participation is not just a process but a mindset, a philosophy of being and acting in the world ecologically, socially, organically, holistically
i. In health promotion the ultimate aim is to improve conditions for optimal health and social justice
b. Participation is relational and cyclical process of questioning answers
c. Role of the health promoter is as a facilitator
d. Community-led action at the neighbourhood scale has proved vital to addressing complex health inequities
i. 4 key actions...
Strengthening the work of community health and well-being at the neighbourhood scale
Ensure accountability for community involvement in governance and decision making
Build community and equity into new data architectures
o Confront structural and historical barriers to systems transformation
e. Implementing participatory methods in the Canadian context involves...
i. - Advancing health promotion in a counter neoliberal way
ii. Importance of relational and connection in participatory practice
iii. - Inherent nature of emergence in constructing solutions with communities to local issues
iv. Importance of transformation for connecting to the wider whole
f. built on Indigenous ways of knowing, even if not explicitly stated
In participatory methods, self determination of communities is fundamental.
a. Starting where people are at
b. Acknowledges the knowledge of community members (ie. they are their own experts)
c. Community members also often think relationally without explicitly stating it - so solutions they come up with will eventually address systemic issues
This week a rubric was provided to us for utilizing participatory methods in health promotion and evaluation. It involves three key steps...
a. Listening to stories
i. captures life experiences, feeling, intellectual, physical, and spiritual selves
ii. people start to understand their world and their place in it
iii. creates spaces for mutual exchange of wisdom and the process of connection to a world created in common and the route to a community’s process of self-inquiry and self-knowledge
b. Engaging in respectful dialogue
i. heart of participatory practice
ii. dialogical relationship between practitioner and the community
can extend to a wider world (ie. human & non-human influences)
iii. co-create meanings and relate to one another in mutual, receiving and trusting ways
iv. pay attention to ways in which existing agendas and social conditions have contributed to current challenges
c. Engaging in critical reflexivity
i. question taken for granted assumptions that emerge in the process of dialogue based on story
ii. where adult learning occurs
iii. "changing attitudes, beliefs, and emotional reactions involves engaging in a process of critical questioning not just an intellectual exercise but as a whole feeling, intuitive, and creative person so that these meaning schemes are embodied"
unpack how dominant narratives, built upon myths have marginalized certain groups
iv. understanding yourself and your place in the world
v. linking individual or local action to wider issues in society
vi. collective process of true empowerment and social learning
d. Participatory methods link people together and communities, and facilitates connections that may extend beyond the community
e. Best understood through the of ecological model
Neoliberalism continues to pose a huge challenge for participatory health promotion.
a. primacy to the indivudual rather than the collective
b. In the last 25 years, health promotion has fallen victim to neoliberalism focussing on short term outcomes, however relationship building (a key method of participatory methods) takes TIME
c. "uphold stratified social status quo by quelling dissent, resistance, and alternative ways of knowing"
d. "people are defined as consumers and to encourage them as atomized individuals to liberate themselves from government imposed constraints, encouraging them to compete in a world, to maximize own economic position and individual health"
Many different models for community organizing exist across the country and globe and are based on different philosophies and strategies for systematically bringing people together to bring about social change
a. Alinsky Tradition
i. “organization of organizations”
ii. people power
iii. "First step of community organization is community disorganization"
iv. Organizers role
Outsider who agitates, listens to the concerns of the people, mobilize them to act on those concerns
Get a licence to operate, establish legitimacy in the community, credential of competency
Agitate to the point of conflict
Helps communities mobilize around specific issues to create change
Persuade people that they can do something
v. Issues
Simple, specific, winnable
gain confidence amoung the community
Contrasts other strategies that may integrate broader ideological issues into organizing such as antiracism or antiviolence
vi. Choose campaign target
vii. Critiques
Non-ideological stance
Narrow focus
Lack of work-life balance for organizers
Narrow self interest as the primary motivation
Reliance on conflict and confrontational tactics
b. Paulo Friere
i. Rooting education in the lived experience of the people who are learning and the development of critical consciousness, begins with peoples own experiences
ii. "culture circles"
iii. popular education, critical pedagogy, empowerment education, liberatory practice, and liberation education
iv. - Listen-dialogue-action-reflection = participatory model of learning --> critical consciousness
v. "people must understand the root causes of their daily life conditions before they can work toward addressing and transforming those root causes"
vi. "the only road to humanization of both the oppressed and the oppressors is through transformation of the structures that dehumanize them. This requires their commitment to understanding the denounced reality and to a theory of action that supports the announced transformation”