Below I provide a brief overview and commentary on each article in these special issues of the Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice. In describing each article below, I have noted the practice competencies highlighted by the authors, and also listed in brackets any other competencies that seemed to me to be especially involved in their work. I also listed any Proposed Competencies specified in each article.
The Community Psychology Practice Competencies (Dalton & Wolfe, 2012) have helped the field of community psychology clarify the skills necessary to engage in community practice in our discipline and have begun to be used for designing curricula and other educational tools in community psychology training programs. Many community psychologists, however, combine elements of both practice and research in their work, and research skills are less represented in the practice competencies than other types of skills. Society for Community Research and Action’s Council on Education recently developed a set of Community Psychology Research Competencies to provide additional depth of understanding of the types of skills and knowledge associated with rigorous and impactful research in community psychology. This paper describes the research competencies and their development and considers them in the context of the existing practice competencies in the interests of expanding the understanding of how research and practice intersect in our training programs and our work in both academic and non-academic settings. An action-research cycle model is presented to help explain how practice and research competencies complement one another and how both are informed by a common set of principles guiding all the activities of our field. Recommendations are then offered for integrating the research and practice competencies across practice- or research-focused training programs.
The article describes community psychologists’ competencies, emphasizing the importance of ecological and systemic perspectives that allow them to deal with individual psychological issues framed in social and cultural domains. Furthermore, it gives evidence of the specific knowledge that the community psychology approach brings to the professional activity: its aims and methodologies. It also explains why individual and social values as well as fairness and justice are affecting psychological, social, and individual well-being. Finally, it describes the community psychology backbone, depicting some peculiar competencies that characterize the interventions of community psychologists in various domains that allow them to use their psychological background in different contexts. These are entailed by the TRIP model, which presents trustfulness, reflexivity, intersectionality, and positionality as community psychologists’ core methodological acquirements as well as basic values.
Community health improvement initiatives are strongly influenced by the local context in which they take place. Community coalitions of diverse stakeholders are expected to determine the needs of their population of interest, select an appropriate strategy, implement with quality, and evaluate for effectiveness. Many public health initiatives look toward behavioral scientists with experience in collaborating with community members. The competencies that community psychologists possess make them particularly useful contributors in these initiatives, especially when the projects explicitly focus on increasing health equity.
This paper describes how community psychologists can contribute to community health improvement work by sharing our experiences in the Spreading Community Accelerators through Learning and Evaluation (SCALE) initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As part of SCALE, community coalitions are expected to develop appropriate aims and corresponding driver diagrams as well as implement quality improvement projects to help reach those aims. We demonstrate how community psychologists operationalize SCALE by working with communities of color in three distinct settings with different contextual factors: the Proviso Partners for Health (Chicago, IL), Boston Medical Center’s Vital Village Network (Boston, MA), and the San Gabriel Valley Healthy Cities Collaborative (Los Angeles, CA). We also describe how community psychologists contribute to the formative evaluation of the entire SCALE project. We note that specific community psychology competencies are applicable across diverse settings in community health improvement work. Consequently, community psychologists can contribute significantly to improving community health and advancing health equity.
In this paper, we first discuss the “political activist” model proposed by critical community psychologists and the specific competencies needed to play this role. We then illustrate the recent passing of regional laws in Italy that create the new figure of the “territorial community psychologist,” who works directly with the services of city municipalities. We outline the tasks the new laws assign to these territorial community psychologists and describe the competencies needed to perform the tasks these laws mandate. Then we discuss if in Italy we need to make further progress in our training of community psychologists to better prepare them for this new role of territorial community psychologists. Finally, we consider if an integration of critical psychology and mainstream community psychology could contribute to strengthen community psychology in Europe.
The establishment of the 18 Community Psychology Practice Competencies created the opportunity for faculty and students at Wichita State University to review the well-established curriculum that had served our doctoral program in community psychology. Further, the development and discussion around the 18 competencies within the field energized us and created curiosity about what our program could be. In a participatory manner involving students, faculty, and alumni, a town hall meeting and a survey were conducted within Wichita State University’s Community Psychology Doctoral Program to assess the current coverage of the 18 competencies and the desired level of coverage of the competencies in the future. With this data, a retreat involving all faculty and students of this program was held, focusing on the strengths of the program and a vision for graduates of the future. This retreat resulted in student and faculty engaged work groups around curriculum and qualifying exams, which were intentional in including the 18 Competencies as guiding principles. The student and faculty Curriculum Work Group conducted a curriculum mapping process that identified which competencies were focused on by particular courses, including which of the 18 competencies were taught in existing courses and what new courses might be offered to address the remaining competencies. The Curriculum Work Group made recommendations that included greater or less emphases on competencies in particular courses, along with adding two classes: Seminar in Social Policy & Advocacy and Seminar in Community Leadership. The Qualifying Exam Work Group focused on student-selected competencies that aligned with career aspirations, substantially changing and, we believe, enhancing our qualifying exams. The 18 Community Psychology Practice Competencies have provided benchmarks for the Community Psychology Doctoral Program at Wichita State University, which has improved our academic quality while allowing greater flexibility for students in the pursuit of their community psychology research and practice careers.
Community psychology practice competencies provide a framework of skills students can learn to promote social change processes in communities. However, there is great overlap and cross-over of skill sets among some competencies. The complex nature of learning any competency will likely take multiple learning experiences to master and span years beyond a student’s exit from training to achieve expertise. Programs training students in practice competencies can benefit from working collaboratively with students to better understand how students develop experience and skill in utilizing competencies across the curriculum. This article explores five narrative accounts of how students and graduates learned selected community psychology practice competencies through their training in the Applied Community Psychology (ACP) specialization at Antioch University Los Angeles. Students and graduates were asked to select a competency and write a two-page narrative of how they learned the competency through their training in the ACP specialization. Implications for academic program development and training in community psychology practice competencies are discussed.
Community psychology practice competencies emerged in an effort to provide guidance to the field of community psychology and training programs seeking to provide students with meaningful opportunities to develop a depth and breadth of practice skills. As a teacher of community psychology practice over the past eleven years, the author has consistently faced challenges in teaching the Ecological Perspectives, listed as number 1 under Foundational Principles – “The ability to articulate and apply multiple ecological perspectives and levels of analysis in community practice” (Dalton, & Wolfe, 2012, p. 10). This paper describes a multilevel social service simulation exercise as a teaching tool for community psychology practice competencies within an academic setting. The simulation focuses on Ecological Perspectives and the role of Social Power Dynamics in Systems Change. Suggested curricular content is also included to follow the simulation debriefing.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of how the community psychology practice competencies are taught in the fieldwork practicum course at two PhD programs in community psychology. An overview of the educational approach and program goals are provided as well as a detailed description of how the course instructors utilize the practice competencies in the practicum courses and the kinds of projects that students conduct to learn the competencies. Comparison of the competencies addressed in each program and lessons learned are provided about program evaluation, graduate education training goals, and fieldwork sequence foci.
This article describes many of the competencies used for consulting with communities in the United States. It includes a description of each competency, how each is used, and tips for developing them. The article begins with a definition of community psychology consulting and how it is different from business or other forms of consulting. The different levels of competence and the interdisciplinary nature of the competencies needed for working in communities are discussed. The article maintains that all community psychology consultants need expertise in foundational competencies such as sociocultural and cross- cultural competence and commitment to improving public welfare and social and racial justice. The extent to which community psychology consultants need expertise in other competencies, such as community program development and management, community and social change, and community research, depends upon the type of consulting practice they will have. There is considerable overlap in competencies required for community psychology practice and those required for social work, public health, public administration, and other fields. Therefore, community psychologists interested in pursuing a career in community consulting might take courses or get additional training in other fields.
Sexual assault on college campuses is a national issue, with a recent report from the White House estimating that 20% of women will experience a sexual assault during college. Students at Wichita State University formed a campus organization to bring visibility to both community psychology and address this important problem. The Community Psychology Association is comprised of both graduate and undergraduate students, and members utilized three community psychology competencies: ecological perspectives, information dissemination/building public awareness, and community organizing and community advocacy in their work to improve resources and campus support for this issue. Community Psychology Association members utilized focus groups with campus students, faculty, and staff to facilitate discussions on sexual assault, campus safety, and university and administrative accountability. Content analysis revealed multiple themes that were used to generate a larger campus discussion and promote change in campus policies. As a result of these activities, major changes occurred at Wichita State, including data driven programming for interventions regarding sexual assault, changes in leadership in the offices of Title IX and Student Affairs, support for a CDC grant, and overall increased organizational awareness for sexual assault survivors. This study highlights the importance of applying community psychology principles and concepts to research and action to ultimately have a positive and tangible impact on the local community.