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 Wallerstein, Sanchez-Merki, and Dow’s Freirian praxis in health education and community organizing: A case study of an adolescent prevention program Any initiative that actively engages adolescents to take control of their lives by illustrating how they can actively and positively participate in their social environment instead of being a victim of it, is powerful. Wallerstein, Sanchez-Merki & Dow (2006) explore a program that utilized at its heart Freirian empowerment education methods and Ronald Rogers (1984… Read More
Reflections on Minkler’s Community organizing among the elderly poor in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district While I am very enthusiastically in support of participatory action research as well as asset-based community development (ABCD) I am also in favor of combining methods to use, whatever is most effective. In this case, neither of the above seemed to work for the Tenderloin Senior Outreach Project but a combination of methods utilizing adaptations… Read More
Reflections on Klitzman, Kass, and Freudenberg’s Coalition building to prevent childhood lead poisoning While this article was written in 2006, and Klitzman, et al (2006) discuss lead poisoning in the water system of New York City, I have to ask, why there is no initiative federally to eliminate the poisons in our water, when, albeit only limitedly, unfortunately, the 14th amendment was used to break down some Jim… 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 Gutiérrez and Lewis’ Education, participation, and capacity building in community organizing with women of color Gutiérrez and Lewis (2006) discuss a topic close to my heart and one that will be an aspect of my participatory action research in the future, community organizing in communities of color, especially with women and girls of color since societally they are the most oppressed and taken for granted and forgotten by the larger… Read More
A Critical Review of Hays’ Community activists’ perceptions of citizenship roles in an urban community Hays, R. A. (2007). Community activists’ perceptions of citizenship roles in an urban community: A case study of attitudes that affect community engagement. Journal of Urban Affairs, 29(4), 401-424 Introduction Allen Hays (Hays, 2007) looks at the connections and barriers between community activism (community-based organizations) and political participation in a small urban community to… Read More
Reflections on Rappaport’s The art of social change – Community narratives as resources for individual and collective identity Rappaport (1998) reinforces a previous written critique I had in another course. Researchers in community psychology as well as humanistic psychology are not there for themselves or to dictate a narrative, whether it is finding a means to evolve through a series of community problems or not. Rappaport explains it as being, “useful to people… Read More
The Neighborhood Windshield Tour and the Community Power Structure of Columbus, GA Introduction I have lived in Georgia twice, once from 1994 in South Georgia in and around Savannah and again from 2010 to the present, in Atlanta, the capitol, and Columbus, a primarily industrial city of over 200,000 (United States Census Bureau, 2016). In that time, I have had an opportunity to contrast and compare the… 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