Community Change Initiatives Research Articles

Sustaining Youth Participation in a Long-term Tobacco Control Initiative: Consideration of a Social Justice Perspective

This article presents an in-depth case study of the Healthy Options for Prevention and Education Coalition’s Teens Tackle Tobacco initiative, a 3-year community-based participatory research (CBPR) project about the distribution of tobacco vendors and tobacco advertising in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using two theoretical frameworks, positive youth development (PYD) and social justice youth development (SJYD), the case reveals personal and community conditions that drove youth to get engaged in this project, how CBPR guided the group’s research and action strategy, and results of the work to date. Analysis of this case highlights factors that facilitate and pose barriers to active youth involvement in a long-term, tobacco-related community change initiative. Specifically, to affect oppressive community conditions, a blend of PYD’s focus on individual skill building, participation, and empowerment— joined with SJYD emphasis on community organizing and building youth’s self-awareness of how race, class, and other dimensions of power affect their lives on a daily basis—is needed.

Foundation Readiness for Community Transformation: Learning in Real Time

Introduction Foundations sponsoring community change initiatives typically devote considerable time to assessing community readiness as they consider how to select communities that are most ready to take advantage of the resources and opportunities that the initiative will afford. What are the existing assets and momentum on which to build? Is there sufficient nonprofit capacity and community leadership? Are markets, politics, and regional forces sufficiently aligned to suggest a promising fit with the foundation’s approach to community change?

Children's Futures: Lessons From a Second-Generation Community Change Initiative

Children's Futures: Lessons From a Second-Generation Community Change Initiative

Collaborative Evaluation in a Community Change Initiative: Dilemmas of Control Over Technical Decision Making

Abstract: Collaborative evaluation brings community stakeholders and evaluators together with the opportunity to provide significant meaning to their work. In a community change initiative, collaborative evaluation also affords the opportunity to build community capacity. This article provides a framework for how collaborative evaluation can help achieve the goals of a community change initiative. The manuscript then explores one process dimension of collaborative evaluation—control over technical decision making—and explicates five dilemmas in its navigation. A case study is provided to illustrate the five dilemmas and to offer strategies for overcoming the pitfalls involved in the process of control over technical decision making. The article concludes with two primary lessons learned for evaluators trying to navigate the control over technical decision-making dilemmas in collaborative evaluation.

Might We Practice What We'ved Preached? Thoughts on the Special Issue Papers

Commentary on the papers of the special issue identifies and discusses four themes: 1) strategies to bridge the gap between science and practice, 2) sources of community science questions of interest, 3) choice and quality of methods, and 4) epistemology and useful language for community science. The commentary identifies some limitations in the models proposed by the special issue authors, and proposes renewed attention to ecology, context and process in community change initiatives, calling for a common set of community level measures as one strategy to advance a community centered science agenda.

Democratic Leadership and Places to Practice It

The renewal or reform of public schools and their communities calls for a moral democratic concept of leadership, which includes the principles and practices of caring, trust, social justice and collaborative inquiry. In contrast to the bureaucratic concept of leadership that has prevailed in public schools and placed a few people in leadership roles, a democratic concept involves everyone and requires the development of leadership skills in teachers, school administrators, students, parents and neighborhood residents. Such a concept can best be served by a merger of teacher and administrator preparation programs, so that future teachers may develop as leaders as well as followers, and future administrators may develop as followers as well as leaders. In such a merger, there must be community and school forums in which preservice teachers and administrators may practice for their future roles and extend the democratic concept of leadership to students, parents, and neighborhood residents. Efforts of one eight-year school and community change initiative, which is now in its sixth year, indicate the type of forum that might effectively serve this need.