Community-based behavioral health interventions: Developing strong community partnerships

The popularity of community-based interventions has experienced a revival over the last two decades. The general theme behind this trend is that greater community involvement provides researchers and practitioners with culturally relevant information to make interventions successful. This involvement is usually solicited through the formation of community coalitions and advisory boards. Although the positive influence of community partnerships is well established, strategies for successfully developing and sustaining these partnerships are less clear. To address this gap, this paper presents evaluation findings from The Making Connections Initiative, a national effort emphasizing community-level prevention strategies for improving the mental health of men/boys. Sixteen grantees were tasked with developing a coalition of community organizations to provide input into the development and implementation of a local prevention initiative. An evaluation of the 16 grantees’ planning activities identified four themes related to developing and sustaining successful community partnerships. This article reports on the strategies that were found most successful across grantees. With the increasing popularity of community-based programs, strategies for successfully partnering with local organizations are particularly important. This study adds to the limited research on best practices for forming community partnerships and should serve as a guide for community-based evaluators and program planners.     

Dynamics between fragmentation and unity: Identity and nonprofit relationship management in the Asian American Community

Focusing on community-based nonprofits with specific missions of serving the Asian American community, this study examined the dynamics between various layers of identity, including ethnicity and panethnicity, and identified how intercultural relationship management contributed to a sense of community and empowerment among minority communities. Interviews from both nonprofit community organizations and community members revealed the following major findings. First, Asian American community nonprofits needed to manage a myriad of identities within their community, particularly the interplay between diverse ethnic identities and the pan-Asian ethnic identity. To help manage these identities, these nonprofits adopted a dual approach using both segmented outreach and coherent advocacy. Second, these community nonprofits used intercultural relationship management to build a sense of community and efficacy, promoting outcomes such as health awareness, communicative activeness, cultural shift, political engagement, and community alliances. This study contributes to relationship management literature through introducing identity-based relationship building strategies.     

Conservation Management of EU Priority Habitats after Collapse of Traditional Pastoralism: Navigating Socioecological Transitions in Mountain Rangeland

Agricultural abandonment is a major driver of change in rural landscapes. Assumed to provide beneficial results to the environment and the conservation of biota, rural abandonment triggers landscape and biotic homogenization and loss of valuable species and habitats. This article focuses on the ecological effects and conservation challenges of shifts in extensive grazing regimes on marginal pastureland of Mediterranean mountains. We conceptualize a navigated socioecological transition toward conservation‐oriented management after the collapse of historical land systems. The article provides examples from the LIFE+ project “Higro,” developed in mountainous protected areas in Portugal, of how management for conservation could sustain disturbance‐dependent habitats. We argue that actively and regularly managing large habitat areas should be envisaged as a short‐term approach to limit the immediate effects of rural abandonment. A gradual integration of conservation targets with other activities in changing rural economies is necessary to foster long‐term conservation of species and habitats, building on the link between conservation‐oriented habitat management and ecosystem services in rural landscapes. Conservation goals should run alongside recovery of social systems and innovation applied to traditional sources of income. This parallel development would contribute to building up social‐ecological resilience by maintaining a diversity of social and ecological capital in rural areas.     

Contemporary strategies for rural community development in Australia: a governmentality perspective

Contemporary strategies for rural development in Australia are based upon notions of self-help and bottom-up, community-based initiatives which are said to `empower’ the individual from the imposing structures of government intervention. While such strategies are not entirely new to Australia, they have, it seems, been inadequately theorised to date and are generally regarded, in rather functionalist terms, as indicative of attempts to cut back on public expenditure. Harnessing itself to the `governmentality’ perspective, this paper explores government and `expert’ discourses of rural community development in Queensland and suggests, instead, that these strategies are indicative of an advanced liberal form of rule which seeks to `govern through community'. With this in mind, three basic research questions are identified as worthy of further exploration; how are the notions of self-governing individuals and communities constructed in political discourse; what political rationalities are used to justify current levels of (non) intervention and finally; what are the discourses, forms and outcomes of empowerment at the local level? The paper concludes by arguing that while the empowering effects of self-help are frequently cited as its greatest virtue, it is not so much control as the added burden of responsibility that is being devolved to local people. Given the emphasis of the governmentality perspective on strategies for `governing at a distance', however, these conclusions can hardly be unexpected.     

Family-Centered,Community-Based Asset Building: A Strategic Use of Individual Development Accounts

This research examines individual development account (IDA) programs as part of a broader community development strategy for low-income/low-wealth communities, particularly communities of color. Through a review of multiple literatures and detailed case studies, we explore the potential of explicitly creating a community-based, family-centered development account program as a step toward a comprehensive community asset building approach in low-income urban neighborhoods. From the perspective of IDA practitioners, such an approach provides program participants with local support networks and access to additional services. From the perspective of grassroots community organizers, such an approach provides tangible benefits to low-income residents of their neighborhoods. The likelihood of success may depend on the availability of local resources to build areas of strength and reduce vulnerabilities, but there are examples where a family-centered, community-based asset building approach seems to thrive.     

A Participant-Informed Model for Preventing Teen Pregnancy in a Rural Latino Community

Recognizing the need for health prevention efforts that are tailored to the needs of Latinos in rural communities, the researchers utilized focus groups to ascertain the perspectives of Latino children and their parents who participated in a teen pregnancy prevention program. This article presents a Latino-driven conceptual design of an evidence-informed comprehensive, community-based, and culturally sensitive teen-pregnancy prevention program. The new model, called the Family-Festival Prevention Model, (1) used culturally relevant and experiential learning activities, (2) promoted community connections, (3) incorporated strategies that engaged fathers, and (4) engaged important faith-based and community stakeholders to involve the whole community in prevention efforts.     

Collaboration for community-based wildlife management

Perhaps as remarkable as the general upsurge in public interest in wildlife over the last 30 years is the trend toward greater community-based wildlife management since the late 1980s. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities at the local, community scale of collaboration for wildlife management. We explain how collaborative activity between the professional wildlife manager and community stakeholders can lead to improved identification of human-wildlife interactions and better understanding of wildlife-related impacts that are of primary management concern in the community. Community-based collaborative decision making can also effectively result in the specification of management actions that are acceptable to a community. Furthermore, agency-community collaboration can lead to co-management that goes beyond stakeholder input or involvement in decision making about management objectives and actions, and includes appropriate sharing of responsibility for implementation and evaluation. A growing role for the wildlife agency in such situations is facilitating the development of local capacity by filling information and process needs so that individuals and groups in a community can participate effectively in collaborative efforts appropriate to the necessary level of agency-community engagement. This opportunity for the wildlife profession promises to be rewarding and have lasting positive influence on communities for the benefit of wildlife management. However, most agencies cannot address every issue at a community level. Public wildlife managers need guidelines for judgment about when to engage in community-based wildlife management. They need to assess various risks associated with not engaging in a particular issue and to prioritize the potential situations where various degrees of community engagement may be desirable. This paper highlights these intriguing challenges and opportunities associated with community-based wildlife management. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Development and application of a rubric to compare strategies for improving access to health care in rural communities in the United States

Rural areas are underserved in terms of the availability of and access to health care services. According to Healthy People 2020, access to health care continues to be the most frequently identified rural health priority in the United States.PurposeThe purpose was to develop an efficient approach for standardizing and prioritizing strategies to improve access to health care in rural areas across the United States. The rubric provides a quantitative metric of the effectiveness of each strategy in terms of impact and feasibility and allows community health departments and other access to care groups to compare strategies and facilitate discussion of various strategies’ ability to meet the needs of diverse communities.FrameworkThe Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle was used to create the rubric. The research team constructed a plan for creating a rubric to measure each strategy’s impact and feasibility. We checked the rubric by applying it to selected access to care improvement strategies evaluated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Members of a rural community Access to Care Workgroup applied the rubric to several RWJF What Works for Health strategies. The final step was to compare the results of the application phase through facilitated conversations with the goal of determining which strategy or strategies would best meet the needs of the rural community.DiscussionA rubric is a valuable tool to facilitate assessment and discussion and for assisting community members in determining access to care priorities. After applying the rubric in a community setting, we identified two important tactics: 1) the rubric is best applied to strategies when they are summarized consistently and cohesively; and 2) it is important to involve community stakeholders early in the process of identifying strategies for evaluation. The next step is to apply the rubric to similar strategies in other rural communities to further validate the rubric’s effectiveness.     

New Economy Businesses in Rural,Urban, and Metropolitan Locations

Abstract The service sector has replaced manufacturing as the primary employer in the United States. Fastest growing within this sector are producer services, i.e., those businesses that provide service inputs to other businesses and government. Theorists posit that the propensity of producer services to locate in metro areas advantages cities in relation to rural areas. They argue that significant numbers of producer services are unlikely to locate in rural areas due to the economic and cultural benefits offered by central cities and that producer services in rural locations are qualitatively different from metro firms. Perceptions of the environment, management strategies, and community citizenship were analyzed with data from 259 producer service business owners and managers in Iowa rural, urban, and metropolitan communities. The findings point to qualitative differences between the businesses based on community size, but also many similarities were found. Rural producer services reported more community citizenship than other businesses.     

‘Farming miners’ or ‘mining farmers’?: Diamond mining and rural development in post-conflict Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone is currently emerging from a brutal civil war that lasted most of the 1990s, and now has the dubious distinction of being ranked among the world's poorest countries. As thousands of displaced people move back to their villages, a large proportion of the predominantly farm-based rural population are growing food crops for the first time in a decade. Alluvial diamond mining makes an important contribution to the national economy, though some would argue that Sierra Leone's diamonds are a ‘resource curse’. Drawing upon research undertaken in the 1970s and also in the post-conflict period, the paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the complex links between the farming and mining sectors. Recent field research in Sierra Leone's Eastern Province, indicates that many links between farming and diamond mining have actually been maintained despite severe dislocation. These links could play a key role in rejuvenating market-oriented food production, providing the much-needed impetus for post-war rural development. In charting a future development trajectory, the paper recognizes the urgent need for an effective management scheme for both mining and marketing diamonds, given the potentially destabilizing effect on the country of the uncontrolled exploitation of this valuable resource. In this context, a recent community-based, integrated management initiative adopted by one local NGO, the Peace Diamond Alliance, is examined. If meaningful rural development is to be achieved among desperately poor communities, development strategies must be based on a detailed understanding of the nature of inter-locking livelihoods in the agricultural and mining sectors.     

Harnessing the community sector

The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically the prevailing policy approach that seeks to cultivate the community sector by the ‘third sector’ route of developing existing community-based groups. Analysing the extent and nature of participation in the community sector using both secondary data from the 2000 General Household Survey and primary data from a case study of the community sector in rural England, the finding is that a culture of participation in ‘third sector’ groups is relatively alien to lower-income populations and that such groups are much more used by relatively affluent populations for the purpose of developing their social networks. If the intention of harnessing the community sector is to improve the material circumstances of lower-income populations, a third sector approach of developing existing community-based groups is thus found to be inappropriate. Instead, it is argued that a ‘fourth sector’ approach is required. This seeks to further cultivate the prevailing culture of participation in one-to-one reciprocal exchange that is predominantly used by lower-income populations to improve their material circumstances. The paper concludes by outlining how this might be achieved.     

The role of community context in planning and implementing community-based health promotion projects

The current study examines how community context affected collaborative planning and implementation in eight sites participating in a healthy cities and communities initiative in California. Data are from 23 focus groups conducted with coalition members, and 76 semi-structured interviews with local coordinators and community leaders. Multiple case study methods were used to identify major themes related to how five contextual domains influenced collaborative planning and implementation. Results showed that history of collaboration can influence resources and interpersonal and organizational connections available for planning and implementation, as well as priorities selected for action. Community politics and history can affect which segments of the community participate in a planning process and what issues are prioritized, as well as the pool of partners willing to aid in implementation. Some community norms and values bring people together and others appear to limit involvement from certain groups. Community demographics and economic conditions may shape outreach strategies for planning and implementation, and may also shape priorities. Geography can play a role in assessment methods, priority selection, partners available to aid in implementation, and participation in activities and events. Results suggest that community context plays a substantive role in shaping how community-based health promotion projects unfold.     

Rural self-reliance strategies in South Africa: community initiatives and external support in the former black homelands

This paper examines the relevance of the concept of self-reliance in the context of rural community economic development in South Africa. Whilst changing global and local circumstances oblige impoverished communities to become more pro-active in the enhancement of the quality of their lives, they nevertheless cannot ignore basic market forces and the need for an appropriate level of external assistance. Four community-based agricultural ventures in South Africa's former Homelands are examined. A comparison between the four schemes permits an assessment to be made of what such community ventures require if they are to succeed and have a meaningful impact on job creation and poverty alleviation. The role of external support agencies and access to markets in each case features prominently in the assessment.     

“Building a Bigger Table”: Mobilizing Social Capital to Develop a Community Food Resource Center

Traditional food initiatives often aim to increase food access through market-based, needs-driven models, leaving basic food requirements unmet for many in the current U.S. food system. Employing qualitative community-based participatory methods, we examine the asset-based developmental stages of a local-level Food and Resource Center (FRC) in rural Stillwater, OK. We consider the ways that social capital can be activated as a community asset for development, articulating how social networks are used to identify, mobilize, and galvanize community support. How has the community identified and mobilized a “stock” of social capital to employ an asset-based approach to developing a food resource center? How can the FRC enhance social capital for the community as a whole? We provide insight into how individual, agency, and institutional actors act as pivotal resources for community development, delineating the ways in which community social capital and asset-based development can influence an organization's operational goals. Additionally, we explore strategies used to enhance linking and bonding forms of social capital as well as obstacles to bridging social capital in the broader community.     

The conservation challenge in sustaining rural environments

The focus of this paper is on obstacles to conservation and specific conservation initiatives. While policy makers are influenced by the social constructions of rural and while there is unlikely to be common agreement on what is rural, convergences can occur on the most efficacious approaches towards conservation through widening communities of knowledge achieved by greater efforts to evaluate strategies and to share experiences from different localities. The paper begins with a brief conceptualization of the trade-offs involved between commodity and non-commodity uses of rural lands. A more elaborate discussion follows of the dominant factors which undermine conservation of rural environments. In the face of these obstacles the paper examines a wide variety of strategies and actions from OECD countries to provide a better balance between commodity and non-commodity functions. Although governments are expected to continue to play an important leadership, policy setting and regulatory role, it is clear from the examples presented in this paper that many important initiatives are coming from non-governmental organizations and that partnerships between public and private sectors and between private and non-governmental sectors have significant potential to clarify issues, to establish common ground and galvanize constructive action.     

Vacation farms and ecotourism in Saskatchewan, Canada

Vacation farms represent an increasingly significant rural diversification option for chronically unstable agriculture-based economies such as Saskatchewan. Concurrently, ecotourism is a rapidly expanding form of tourism which could serve to enhance the recreation product of such rural enterprises. Accordingly, a self-administered questionnaire was sent to all listed vacation farm operators in the province to obtain information on the provision of ecotourism opportunities. Just over one-half (n = 40) of all operations returned a completed questionnaire. Of 23 listed recreation options, wildlife viewing was cited as the activity most frequently undertaken by vacation farm visitors, followed by hunting, casual photography and touring. Wildlife viewing occurred most commonly during the spring and summer, with access to the resource occurring mainly on foot, and less so by horse and vehicle. Birds were the most important category of wildlife viewed, followed by mammals and plants; reptiles/amphibians, insects and fish were of only minor significance. It was evident that the sampled vacation farm operators possessed very little training in the area of ecotourism; few barriers or opportunities related to the latter were indicated. Appropriate recommendations include the provision of ecotourism training opportunities, stronger linkages between vacation farms and public spaces, and further investigation into the relationship between wildlife viewing and hunting activities.     

No Overall Control: Experiencing Community Development in Rural Britain

The publication is a welcome addition to the limited sourcesof literature available to community-based practitioners generallyand particularly to those working in rural areas. ‘NoOverall Control’ aims to explore the reality of communitydevelopment in rural Britain, through a series of stories thathighlight the conflicts and tensions that appear to be a featureof rural change. The book starts with an outline of the issues, policy contextand the increasing though still underdeveloped research basearound community activity and community involvement in ruralareas. It then takes a micro level     

Promoting a Development Focus in the Community Organization Curriculum

As the problem of poverty has become more acute, community organization teaching needs to focus more directly on programs that will raise standards of living at the local level. This article suggests that African community development is highly relevant to the promotion of community-based economic and social development projects. Although the idea that approaches from Third World countries can be adapted to enhance educational programs in the United States is a novel one, the African approach to community development has much to offer American schools of social work that are seeking to prepare students to work with poor communities in both inner-city and rural areas.     

Surabaya green and clean: Protecting urban environment through civic engagement community

ABSTRACT

This study explores the involvement of townspeople in efforts to protect their environment through environmental awareness program. The environmental program implemented is Surabaya Green and Clean (SGC) which was initiated by Surabaya City government since 2005 in kampung (community-based housing) in Surabaya (Indonesia). This study employed a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, observations, and literature studies as data collection technique. The data were taken in Kampung Margorukun with a total of 14 informants involving the head of kampung, environmental cadres, and residents who are engaged in developing Kampung Margorukun to be one of the ecotourism models. The research results indicate that the resident involvement in SGC includes environmental cadres formation, environmental awareness education, waste recycling, waste bank management, and ecotourism development. The implementation of SGC in Kampung Margorukun is a form of operationalization of residents’ concern for environmental protection and sustainable development from ecological citizenship perspective.     

The Third Shift? Gender and Empowerment in a Women’s Ecotourism Cooperative

Ecotourism is lauded as a path toward sustainable development and women’s empowerment in rural areas around the world, but little is known about how gendered expectations shape its processes and outcomes. This paper employs an in-depth qualitative case study of a female-only ecotourism cooperative in rural Mexico to investigate how local gender dynamics influence women’s opportunities to benefit from ecotourism development. Findings show that women’s family and work commitments prevent their ability to devote the resources and energy necessary to make the cooperative successful. In this context, women are first expected to be wives and mothers, and to fulfill the substantial daily expectations associated with those roles. In addition, most women work outside the home. This leaves little time or energy for a “third shift” as ecotourism entrepreneurs running their own cooperative. Women put their own interests and goals on the back burner, because of the demands of the first two shifts. If ecotourism is to empower women, localized gender structures must be understood and addressed. Overlooking these challenges can mean that ecotourism projects, even those specifically aimed at empowering women, may only further burden women and reinforce gender models that perpetuate inequality.