Identifying a project’s greatest ‘hits’: meaningful use of Facebook in an underserved community’s development and mobilisation effort

ABSTRACT

A community-wide effort to prioritise mobilisation, empowerment and capacity building offers a nearly unlimited opportunity to foster networked relationships using technology to connect adults and youth, neighbours and community partners, services and clients. As the emphasis of social work is on identifying strengths, finding specialised resources to enhance strengths or fill gaps and connecting community members representing a broad spectrum of social contexts, the role of social work is essential to successful use of digital networks to achieve maximum impact. This paper offers a description of the integration of current digital networking tools into a community-wide initiative to combat neighbourhood violence, encourage resident empowerment activities, and, thereby, improve the health and safety of all residents as a result of networked relationships. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate the challenges and successes that emerged from the use of Facebook to inform and motivate community residents to participate in project-focused activities. Based on our findings and building off of previous literature, we offer recommendations in the form of the Community mobilisation through social media framework for social workers engaged in community organising and enhancement initiatives designed to use technology to initiate, foster and accelerate resident involvement for positive action.

KEYWORDS:

• Community organising
• social media
• networked relationships
• social work
• community mobilisation
• digital communications

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US Department of Justice [2016-AJ-BX-0004].

Notes on contributors

Mary Ellen Brown

Mary Ellen Brown is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University, and a Faculty Associate with the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center. Her areas of scholarship include community-engaged neighborhood-level research with minority populations, and specifically community-based participatory research approaches to sustainable social transformation.

Patricia A. Dustman

Patricia A. Dustman is Director of Implementation & Development for the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center at Arizona State University. She collaborates with investigators on a wide-range of research activities including a focus on proposal development, CBPR studies emphasizing prevention intervention creation and testing, community-based implementation plans, and research dissemination efforts. Her extensive background in K-12 public education offers investigators insights and support into building collaborations across community agencies and organizations as well as schools.