Navigating Community Engagement

Grassroots Maternal Child Health Leadership Curriculum

“…The curriculum uses images and quotes to evoke emotional responses from the GMCHL and data to appeal to their intellectual learning. The goal is to combine the knowledge and expertise of the facilitator with that of the GMCHL, thus creating new knowledge for optimal community development work (Smith, Tiwari & Lommerse, 2014). Learning objectives were created using Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, and Krathwohl (1956) Statistics, 2003).…”

“…(Bourdieu, 1986). Building community capacity in neighborhoods at risk for poor outcomes will result in an improvement to community members' abilities to cope with adversity and limitations, foster a sense of place (McMurray & Clendon, 2011) and help lead the physical, social, economic or environmental transformation (Smith et al, 2014) of their neighborhood to support improved birth outcomes.…”

“…Previous studies demonstrate that fostering community leaders for community-based health promotion efforts resulted in program sustainability, incorporation of health promotion elements into non-health sector community institutions and mediated the creation of multisector teams in the community to address health problems (Goodman & Steckler, 1987/88;Orlandi, 1986;Shediac-Rizkallah & Bone, 1998. Our approach builds on the previous work of others by incorporating the lifecourse theory (Lu & Halfton, 2003), a place-and community-based approach (Gabbe et al, 2017;Pies, Barr, Strouse, & Kotelchuck,, 2016) and bringing the community in as its own specific discipline (Reynolds et al, 2015;Smith, Tiwari, & Lommerse, 2014). This manuscript presents the process of developing and testing this curriculum for training GMCHL.…”

Desirable Dense Neighbourhoods: An Environmental Psychological Approach for Understanding Community Resistance to Densification

“…Challenges that emerge from collaborative processes such as resistance and conflict are a normal response from parties whose interests may be affected or threatened by the change (Leitch et al, 2008;Pierson, 2008). Therefore, addressing community opposition by just inviting them to several meetings and talking to them about the project (Rifkin & Pridmore, 2001) is a limited consultation and offers no assurance that citizen concerns and ideas will be taken into account, it is simply tokenism (Arnstein ,1969, Figure 3 (Arnstein, 1969, p.217) Furthermore, if the process is seen as a 'tool' not a 'goal', it carries a risk of creating an 'us and them' divide (Dudley 1993 cited in Smith et al, 2014). It has the potential to exacerbate resistance, causing a failure in planning for a place.…”

Living Positive: Life in Community Among Puerto Rican Men Living with HIV in Boston

“…Community, however, can be as vague as the concept itself. For a long time, the concept of community was primarily related to some spatial concept of a locality or the equivalent between society and place (Brunt 2001); it described a geographical place, primarily as an area of common living (MacIver 1931;Smith 1939;Durant 1939;Mannheim 1940;Warner and Lunt 1941;Keur and Keur 1955;Warren 1963;Smith 2001). Thus, many authors defined community as a variation of a "territorial group of people with a common mode of living striving for common objectives" (Durant 1939:ix).…”