It seems only appropriate to take a moment to pause and reflect when reaching important milestones, and with this new year, the Journal of Community Practice (JCP) and its sponsor, the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA), look to pause and reflect on our milestones. You may have already noticed the bright celebratory banner addition to the front cover of this first issue marking Volume 25 for the Journal of Community Practice. The 25th is always an important milestone.
This is indeed an accomplishment for our journal, which continues to grow its importance and influence in the field. So, 2017 is a year of celebrating the twenty-five volumes milestone for JCP. We wonder if JCP founding editor Marie Weil envisioned a 25th volume when she began the journal. Yet, here we are, and each year our publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, continues to present the Marie Weil Award for the best article from the past journal volume. This past year, from Volume 23, ACOSA and our publisher recognized Michael J. Parks, from the Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Division of the Minnesota Department of Health with the Marie Weil Award for his article, “Who Is Our Neighbor?: Toward a Multilevel and Cross-National Roadmap for Building Community Capacity.” Congratulations to Michael for this achievement. We wonder which author(s) will be recognized for their contribution in this 25th volume.
It also seems fitting that our current editor team will end its tenure working on this 25th Volume. Two of us—Lorraine Gutiérrez and Tracy Soska—will be wrapping up as JCP editors, each of us having served ten years at the JCP editorial helm. However, we are excited that another member of our team, Anna Maria Santiago, will lead the next editorial team commencing with Volume 26 in 2018. Anna Maria will introduce her new editorial team in a future issue.
2017 marks a double celebratory milestone: ACOSA will be marking its 30th anniversary this year. On March 8, 1987, an organizing meeting was held during the COSA Symposium at the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) Annual Program Meeting (APM) in St. Louis, MO. At that meeting, the bylaws were ratified to form the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration and the formal organization developed during that year. So, it only seem fitting that we take a moment to reflect on this organizational milestone that would then formalize its Journal of Community Practice a few years later. Join us in congratulating ACOSA as it reaches its 30th year.
While plans are being set to celebrate ACOSA’s 30th Anniversary at the CSWE-APM in Dallas in October 2017, the leadership of ACOSA is also working to use this milestone year to encourage an ACOSA strategic retreat and dialogue in New York City on June 14th, in concert with ACOSA’s co-sponsorship of the Community Collaboration track at the Network of Social Work Management Conference, which will also be held in New York City (June 15–16). Given the work that went into the emerging ACOSA organization in 1987, it seems only appropriate to take time this year to revisit our history, mission, and vision as we plan ahead. Not only does this seem an important milestone year for celebration, but also, for strategic dialogue and visioning for the future of ACOSA. Stay tuned on the ACOSA webpage—also under redesign during this anniversary year—for developing news (www.acosa.org).
The work of community practice, as our JCP subtitle acknowledges is “organizing, planning, development, and change.” We may well need all those practice skills during this New Year and the years ahead. As we reflect on our milestones, we cannot also help but reflect on the changing political landscape and social climate in the United States. While we cannot know for certain what the year ahead and beyond will hold for America, we do know that it will be a marked change from the past eight years of President Obama’s administration. Certainly the Trump presidency will pose great change, and perhaps even grave dangers to the progressive agenda in America that has sought social and economic justice in our communities and for our country. So, while this is a year to celebrate, it is also a year to be wary and to watch what unfolds in our political and social landscape in the days, months, and years ahead.
For our sponsoring organization, ACOSA, using this anniversary year to revisit its past to plan a vision for the future will certainly be a vital task. For Journal of Community Practice, the research and scholarship from the field in the coming years may well help reveal the depth and direction of change and how that impacts communities in America and across the world as well as the people who reside in them.
As we pause to reflect and celebrate some of our milestones, our editorial work continues with the introduction of this first issue in Volume 25. The articles in this issue are far ranging both geographically and topically, and they offer us opportunities to appreciate current social issues, such as the concerns of undocumented immigrants or what enhances community well-being and perceptions of healthy community environments. They provide us with an important lens about why and how youth can help build our future communities in addition to a glimpse back in time to understand why community outreach and community-based systems of care are essential and lasting responses to community crises. They also examine new settings for social work engagement in emerging new community centers that we’ve long known as libraries as well as advancing models for better applying citizen leadership development skills to address community issues.
In her case study, “‘No One Will Speak for Us’: Empowering Undocumented Immigrant Women Through Policy Advocacy,” Alice B. Gates focuses on an organized group of Mexican immigrant mothers engaged in policy advocacy in the Pacific Northwest. The study examines the work of a local women’s empowerment organization that targeted state policy to aid immigrants access to state tuition assistance, driver’s licenses, and early childhood education. Utilizing in-depth interviews with participants, a project coordinator, and state legislators, the author investigates how participants understand and describe their policy advocacy and how their experiences reflect or challenge assumptions about immigrant women’s engagement in politics. Immigrant women seeking to improve individual, family, and community well-being drew from their roles as mothers and caregivers to guide advocacy efforts. They came to see themselves as political and their voices as important to the policy process as well as change agents in their own lives and communities. While many of their political objectives, e.g., driver’s licenses for immigrants, were not successful, their efforts still transformed and empowered these immigrant women as advocates for their own interests and those of their families and communities.
Kevany, Ma, Biggs, and MacMichael investigate factors the mediate and foster living well in two rural communities in Nova Scotia, specifically Tatamagouche and Advocate Harbour, where residents identified many factors that contributed to living well including: community engagement, appreciation of natural beauty, vibrant arts and culture, citizen efficacy, and a sense of shared responsibility, environmental sustainability, healthy lifestyles, self-sufficiency, being hospitable, compassionate, playful, and grateful. Employing Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as the qualitative method to gather data through interviews and focus groups, the authors identified four larger constructs constituting well-being: vibrancy, prosperity, resiliency, and sustainability. While further study is still needed, evidence found in these communities underscores how multi-dimensional, interrelated, and complex these factors are and how they might further enhance well-being with greater community appreciation and planning around these qualities.
Moving from rural to urban, Mason, Ellis, and Hathaway examine how environmental conditions can vary widely in urban areas in “Experiences of Urban Environmental Conditions in Socially and Economically Diverse Neighborhoods.” Conditions, such as, temperature, green space, air quality, and others can differ among and within cities and can be experienced and perceived differently by residents. Through in-depth interviews with residents from socially and economically diverse neighborhoods in Knoxville, Tennessee, the authors examine if we can better understand this variability and appreciate the implications for social work, community development, and other multi-disciplinary efforts in areas of pressing environmental change by directly engaging residents and stakeholders to examine and comprehend their lived experience. They find that across neighborhoods, concerns on weather extremes, green space, air quality, and environmental action vary in ways that often correspond with social and economic status. In addition, the elderly and children are more vulnerable to changing environmental conditions. Social work knowledge of participatory processes and community engagement could supplement technical approaches to environmental data collection and problem-solving in engineering and other science disciplines while working across research disciplines and with residents, communities, policy-makers, and practitioners to help protect and restore harmful environmental conditions.
In “Critical Discourse, Applied Inquiry and Public Health Action with Urban Middle School Students: Lessons Learned Engaging Youth in Critical Service-Learning,” the authors, Sprague Martinez, Reich, Flores, Ndulue, Brugge, Gute, and Peréa, present an illustrative case study of service-learning intervention that addresses both health equity and action for middle school youth of color in a Boston public school. They argue that engaging local youth in community-based participatory research can help to improve their overall health and well-being. Relying on youth as assets relative to their community social ties, knowledge of culture and social norms, and creative energy can make them equitable partners in planning, designing, implementing, and evaluating public health practices that aim to decrease inequities in health and enhance the sustainability of community interventions. The use of a critical service-learning framework was a key lesson in conducting this project that utilized a strengths-based youth engagement approach that incorporated applied inquiry, critical pedagogy, organizing, and advocacy. Young people have valuable perspectives on public health and should be afforded the tools to help promote local health equity as they gain research and community service experiences in promoting community health.
Our From the Archives contribution from Laurel Iverson Hitchcock and Paul H. Stuart (Archives Editor) examines “Pioneering Health Care for Children with Disabilities: Untold Legacy of the 1916 Polio Epidemic in the United States.” Utilizing the 1916 polio epidemic as a case study, we learn how ill-prepared medical practice was to stop the disease and help survivors. While history has well-documented the development of a polio vaccine in the mid-20th century, little is written about the significant work to provide rehabilitation services to polio-afflicted children. This research explores the Polio After-Care Committee, as a new form of community practice to aid children with disabilities, which changed community-level systems of care and demonstrated that community-based service organizations could provide medical care that reached children.
Kelley, Riggleman, Clara, and Navarro examine the potential role of social work practice within public libraries in “Determining the Need for Social Work Practice in a Public Library.” Libraries today are very different places than many knew growing up as they have become life-long community learning centers and community centers for programs and civic engagement as information becomes more digitized and electronic. Libraries continually seek to identify patron needs and pursue creative ways to provide social programs and services. This From the Field article explores how one suburban library carried out community engagement using a community-university partnership in which social work students reviewed literature, surveyed library patrons, and conducted interviews with staff members. Patrons identified the need for services related to children’s success in school, resources needed for health care, food resources, and employment services. They also identified concerns with homelessness, mental illness, and unemployment. Implications from this study support the idea of providing social work practice at this library to enhance opportunities to improve individual, family, and community well-being.
Many community leadership development programs devote tremendous resources to help improve the vitality and wealth of individuals and communities through the development of local leadership capacities. One great challenge in this work is that these programs fail to coordinate existing community resources to create opportunities to engage program graduates collectively in sustained efforts. In this From the Field article, “The We-Lead Model for Bridging the Low-Income Community Leadership Skills-Practice Gap,” authors Majee, Goodman, Reed Adams, and Keller examine the effectiveness of leadership development programs in creating engagement opportunities. They expand on a U-Lead model and propose a WE-Lead model that can better address the skills-practice gap. By emphasizing the importance of aligning community leadership development programs to community needs through building community coalitions that sustained and coordinate efforts, community leaders are better able to lead together than apart.
As always we are grateful to our many wonderful reviewers who make our Journal of Community Practice a quality publication. Their input on articles and suggestions to authors are great resources that make what you read better for their timely and helpful contributions. As we present our first issue in this milestone 25th volume, we would like to thank our reviewers for their work with our authors. Thanks to Steven Anderson, Candyce Berger, Edward Berkowitz, Julie Birkenmaier, David Boje, Jaime Booth, Shane Brady, Fred Brooks, Matthew Chin, Melvin Delgado, Elizabeth Essex, Maria Ferrera, Robert Fisher, Seymour Friedland, Dee Gamble, Larry Gant, Charles Garvin, Kari M. Gloppen, Meghan Z. Gough, Colleen Grogan, Donna Hardina, Michele Kelley, Sacha Klein, Peter Lee, Jie Lu, Steven McMurtry, Rebecca Miles, Shari Miller, Dorlisa Minnick, Eva Moya, Susan Murty, F. Ellen Netting, Uma Palanisamy, Shanta Pandey, Rebecca Sander, Terry Shaw, Micheal L. Shier, Tracy Soska, Julie Spielberger, Suzanne Velazquez, and Emily C. Weinstein for their contributions to this issue.
As always we welcome others to join our reviewer ranks. If you would like to review for the Journal of Community Practice, just email your curriculum vitae with your contact information to our Managing Editor, Ana H. Santiago-SanRoman at [email protected].
Thus, we begin a New Year with important milestones worth celebrating. We hope you enjoy this first issue in our Volume 25 of the Journal of Community Practice, and we hope you continue to be or will become active in the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration. Please join us for the ACOSA strategic gathering this June in New York City and for our 30th Anniversary celebration at the Council on Social Work Education Annual Program Meeting in Dallas in October 2017. For information on ACOSA visit our Website at www.acosa.org and stay tuned for the new and improved website coming this year.
Yours in Celebration,