Volume 5, No. 2

Marcia Rosalie Hale

Community Organizing: for Resource Provision or Transformation? A Review of the Literature

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Community organizing was originally intended to be the most democratic form of activism, a tool to be used to empower the marginalized and voiceless, bringing people together to work toward a common goal. While the goals of organizing activities are diverse, they can be classified within two general objectives, the first of which is resource provision and the second, transformation. Resource provision seeks to ensure that a community is provided with a resource it is lacking. Transformative organizing includes but goes beyond the goal of resource provision, endeavoring to fundamentally change the community as well as larger structures to ensure the rights and liberties of groups and individuals, and to realize a more equitable distribution of resources and power. This paper explores those aspects that differentiate transformative organizing from resource provision and makes the case that individuals involved in organizing must experience personal transformation before we are able to fundamentally change external structures and systems, as the structures organizers seek to change dwell within the emotional and psychological lives of us all.

Mari Yoshinaga, Yoshika Takeda, Isami Kinoshita

Effects of Participation in Community Activities on Self-Efficacy of Japanese Junior High School Students

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Evaluating how participating in various experiences affects young people is important to promote further participation in community practices. We examined the effects of participation on junior-high school students’ self-efficacy and motivation towards community-improvement activities: of 114 students from a junior high school (Study 1) and 10 voluntarily participated in a park-design project (Study 2).  The experience of participation even in small-scaled contributed to increasing the self-efficacy of the participants and especially enhancing their motivation with regard to community empowerment.

Rachael D. Goodman, Jessica A. Vilbas, Reston N. Bell

A Qualitative Exploration of Counseling Student Development through Community Outreach

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Community outreach and service learning have been shown to facilitate counseling and psychology student development. Community outreaches conducted from a liberation psychology-based perspective are particularly effective in terms of promoting multicultural competence and social justice ideals and actions among outreach participants. Using qualitative interviews of students participating in a local community outreach, the authors explore student development with a focus on multicultural and social justice practices. The authors discuss the implications for facilitating community outreaches based on the data from student participants.

Kate S. Chutuape, Adaline Z. Muyeed, Nancy Willard, Lauren Greenberg, Jonathan M. Ellen, Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions

Adding to the HIV Prevention Portfolio – the Achievement of Structural Changes by 13 Connect to Protect® Coalitions

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Opportunities to control risk factors that contribute to HIV transmission and acquisition extend far beyond individuals and include addressing social and structural determinants of HIV risk, such as inadequate housing, poor access to healthcare and economic insecurity. The infrastructure within communities, including the policies and practices that guide institutions and organizations, should be considered crucial targets for change. This paper examines the extent to which 13 community coalitions across the U.S. and Puerto Rico were able to achieve “structural change” objectives (i.e., new or modified practices or policies) as an intermediate step toward the long-term goal of reducing HIV risk among adolescents and young adults (12-24 years old). The study resulted in the completion of 245 objectives with 70% categorized as structural in nature. Coalitions targeted social services, education and government as primary community sectors to adopt structural changes. A median of 12 key actors and six new key actors contributed to accomplishing structural changes. Structural change objectives required a median of seven months to complete. The structural changes achieved offer new ideas for community health educators and practitioners seeking to bolster their HIV prevention agenda.

Jana Sladkova, Allyssa McCabe, Isabel Cano, Danielle Cole

“I don’t like speaking Spanish:” delayed narration in children of Latino immigrants

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The ability to tell a narrative upon entrance to kindergarten predicts expressive vocabulary and reading comprehension in fourth, seventh, and tenth grades. Current pervasive anti-immigrant environments and law enforcement practices have been shown to have a detrimental impact on a variety of developmental phenomena of immigrant children. Although it has not been extensively explored, narration ability may well be one of these, a gap this study seeks to address. The present study examined personal narratives of 14 children, aged four to ten, from Spanish-speaking immigrant homes. Results show that children’s narratives were considerably less well-structured than those of Spanish-speaking or English-speaking monolingual age peers. A possible explanation is that current immigration policy, which emphasizes deportation, may influence parents behavior and their socio-economic status and interfere with their inclination to foster their children’s Spanish skills and consequently with the children’s language and literacy development.