Building Community Leaders in Underserved Communities: An Exploration of the Role of Seed-Funding for Community Projects by Program Graduates

Investing in community leadership development (CLD) remains a strategy with promise in creating vibrant communities. Although many low-income CLD programs teach effective leadership skills, these often lay fallow due to lacking opportunities for graduates to apply the skills. This study explores how providing competitive minigrants fuels the creation of value-adding community projects. In-depth interviews were conducted with 55 graduates of a low-income CLD program, 19 facilitators, and 12 community members knowledgeable about the program. The study observed that by providing seed money for graduate projects, CLD programs can help translate skills into practice thereby increasing community engagement and socio-economic wellbeing.     

“We’re Not in Oz Anymore”: Shifting Generational Perspectives and Tensions of Gay Community,Identity, and Future

This essay analyzes the writings from a gay male intergenerational project, wherein the process of generating creative prose, poetry, and fiction are used to explore differing understandings of age, aging, and future across gay male cohorts in Chicago. The project suggests one’s age strongly informs one’s perception of power dynamics and one’s perceived access to power. Specifically, youthist logics and lingering cultural myths surrounding the aging gay male shape and constrain intergenerational relations. Furthermore, the study marks and theorizes an emergent generational divide in the conceptualization and articulation of “gay identity” as well as how this identity is understood in relation to “the gay community.” The essay concludes by examining the implications and potential of this research to expand models and logics for meaningful gay male intergenerational exchange, or a queered form of generativity.     

体制化“空转”： 发展悖境中社区工作站运行的组织行为分析——以S市X社区为例

社区工作站作为承接政府社区公共服务职能的新型社会组织，似乎并未真正摒弃行政化积弊及普遍性怠政现象，凸显出事实与价值背离的发展悖境态势。在当前新工作情境下，社区工作站无论是窗口、街头还是社区,其实都呈现出无工作负荷的“空转”状态，并彰显惯习性运作的体制化印记，而体制化“空转”的致因逻辑又在于情境暗示效应下的规章制度软性约束、街道办“示范效应”及社区工作“应付法则”。对此，有必要由情境反思予以解悖，从“干净的石板（clean slate）”出发，在政策原点上破解社区工作站的运行困境，尝试社区工作站的机构撤并及职能删减,以摒除社区公共服务工作中本不该有的体制化“空转”状态，力促基层组织体制改革去行政化的不二取向。     

An integrated system of engaging social workers and community volunteers in social care for the elderly: case studies in Taiwan

Integrating volunteers into social care is widely expected but rarely successful in practice. This paper discusses how the Community Care Centre Plan organising community volunteers to provide services to the elderly in Taiwan. This plan successfully integrated social workers and volunteers in a national system to offer service in local communities, showing a systemic practice of community care and a unique case of community-based and volunteer-based service. The purposes of this paper are to introduce the programme design and to understand how to integrate the mission of social workers and volunteers’ performance. The governmental policy and requirements, the role of social workers and the provision of voluntary community service which contributed to form the system were examined in this paper.     

The politics of community arts: quilting the power and identity of women

This article attempts to articulate and re-validate the unique social contributions of marginalized and working women to their communities and to society-at-large, contributions which tend to be obscured if not forgotten, given the global dynamics of exclusion as they are at work in the capitalist society of Hong Kong. It looks at how a group of disenfranchised women workers renegotiate their identity, reclaim their dignity and regenerate social power through a community arts project ‘Quilting the Power and Identity’; that is, how through these creative but powerful actions, their transformation from a transient state of imposed victimhood into active agency could be made possible.     

多代合居模式下的卫浴空间通用设计

老年人、青年人、儿童多代合居的家庭,因生活方式的差异致使传统的卫浴空间设计显现出诸多问题。在空间规划、设施配置、氛围营造三个方面引入通用设计理念,合理设计卫浴空间使合居家庭的生活更加融洽。     

Client Personality,Working Alliance and Outcome

Abstract

The relationship of the five-factor model of personality to working alliance, symptoms and well-being was examined in a diverse community mental health sample (N = 103). Agreeableness, openness, extraversion and conscientiousness were associated with alliance. Neuroticism was strongly associated with symptoms, and negatively associated with well-being. Extraversion was moderately associated with well-being. Personality is deserving of further study as a potentially important influence on therapy process and outcome. Part of the much-replicated association of alliance with outcome may be accounted for by personality. Implications for social work practice and research are discussed.     

Building community: a conceptual framework for child protection

This paper proposes a community-building framework as an innovative strategy to begin to re-claim children and families at risk. It is a strategy that identifies a purpose, a value base, knowledge and theoretical dimensions, and methods of practice that present as an approach for child welfare systems to consider shifts in thinking in order to meet what is considered the most important challenge of the next century: that of rediscovering community. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.