Creating a Healthy Community Arts and Music Initiative in Columbus, GA Introduction With the goal of finding a local healthy arts and music community initiative, I went looking for local programs because there has been at least one in every city I have lived, and because I am personally more interested in and committed to music than most other cultural activities. Unfortunately, I was not able… Read More
Reflections on Foshee’s Involving schools and communities in preventing adolescent dating abuse The title of Foshee’s (1998) article suggests preventative measures to minimize adolescent dating abuse. It is, but I will take issue with a few basic ideas and methods later. Towards that end, “Safe Dates,” a school- and community-based adolescent abuse prevention program was studied to determine if the intervention helped to alleviate intimate partner violence. … Read More
Reflections on Kretzmann and McKnight’s Building Communities from the Inside Out (pp. 171-376) Kretzmann and McKnight (1993) cover all aspects of community building from individuals to associations to local institutions and taking those assets and rebuilding and mobilizing. I may have reiterated this before, but while this book is powerful, it is large and not portable and there are no printable forms. Since its printing in 1993, it… Read More
Reflections on Kretzmann & McKnight’s Building Communities from the Inside Out (pp. 109-170) Kretzmann & McKnight (1993) have codified, more or less what I have done to research necessary information, be it looking for research materials for a report, digging up an obscure musical recording, and especially resources to help individuals with personal or health crises. Here it is codified neatly into one compact place, this time with… Read More
Reflections on Kretzmann & McKnight’s Building Communities from the Inside Out (pp. 1-107) Kretzmann & McKnight (1993) provide us with the equivalent of a bible, one to implement asset-based community (or capacity-focused) development from the ground up. This isn’t about assessing needs, deficiencies, and problems, but discovering a community’s capacities and assets. This is an important distinction because it takes the standard way of solving community problems with… Read More
Personal Reflections on My Role within Unconquered Minds and a Critique of Minkler & Hancock’s Community health assessment or healthy community assessment: Whose community? Whose health? Whose assessment? Understanding Health, Community, and Community Health How health, community, and community health are examined, utilized, and defined depend upon the representatives of the community involved. All are key, all are vital, and all are based upon the perspective of key individuals and groups. A politician will obviously differ from a health care provider, a social… Read More
Reflections on Jackson & Volckens’ Community stressors and racism and Minkler’s Introduction to community organizing and community building I appreciate the idea that we are studying a practical, on-the-ground-activist-map and an academic and analytical one. The readings of Minkler’s (2006) case studies and Jackson & Volckens (1998) illustrate this very well. While Jackson’s “reverberation theory of stress and racism” as it occurs in both the dominant political majority group and throughout the subgroup… Read More
Reflections on Locke, Silverman, and Spirduso’s Reading and Understanding Research and the Institutional Review Board The research process is something that feels very familiar to me. While I am always learning, always searching and seeking, and perpetually digging deeper, not for passages to prove q point, though that is not unfamiliar to me, but to learn, always to learn more. Locke, Silverman, and Spirduso (2010), introduce the idea of researching… Read More
Reflections On Daniel Boorstein’s “Ten-Nine-Eight-Childline!” and “What Kind of Mother Are You?” History in the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States is filled with example after example of the upper classes, the rich and wealthy, engaging in social reform of the poor and the lower classes. But those rich and wealthy, who thought they knew better, passed judgment on those so-called poor and lower classes, and judged… Read More
Reflections On McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity and Mathie & Cunningham’s From clients to citizens – Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity address an issue that I have puzzled over for many years: How can the government create an incentive to better one’s life circumstances without creating and perpetuating an environment of unhealthy need and dependence that engenders mere existence and probably hopelessness, to create producers rather than service clients? Unfortunately,… Read More