framingtheissueswithin thecommunity

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C H A P T E R 4Framing the Issues Withinthe Community

The Social Construction of Practiceon the Road Toward Personal andCommunity Transformation

MICRO MEETS MACRO

“Hey, who woulda believed it?” Ellis grinned across the cubicle at his new office mate. “Fromfighting in class to working together on the same project in the field!” Due to job transfers athis first-year social work field placement, he had had to change to a new agency. Surprisingeveryone but Kay, he’d asked to work with her. Their community assessment had gone so wellthat there now was follow-up work to shape their strategic recommendations into an actualcampaign issue for Kay’s agency. Since it promised to be work that spread beyond CentralHarlem, Kay’s supervisor was happy to have an extra pair of hands, especially one whose tal-ent with research was so obvious.Kay reached over and handed him two keys. “In honor of your arrival, I got keys for this office

and the bathroom made for you.” She smiled. “So you owe me big!” Ellis took the keys and gin-gerly shook them in his hand.“Why a bathroom key? Agency afraid of outsiders using the facilities?”

(Continued)

98 Macro Practice in Social Work for the 21st Century

(Continued)

“Yeah, right.” Kay’s voice held a touch of sarcasm. “When the agency took over the buildingspace a few years ago, this was how it was. They weren’t going to waste money on new locksfor every floor when keys are a lot cheaper. Are you always gonna be paranoid?”Ellis blushed and laughed at himself. “Old habits die hard, Kay. Sorry.”During their long five-hour talk, they had both shared a lot of their histories as a way to

unlock the mysteries as to why each had been thrown off guard during the interviews. Kaygrew up with a single mom in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, seeing her austere andaloof father only on the occasional holiday when she was young, almost never after her teenyears. Ellis had come from an intact family of strivers, his mom a pediatrician, his father a cor-porate lawyer who had moved their family to an exclusive Connecticut suburb when Ellis wasfour and his sister three. A day student at a well-regarded prep school, he’d had a warm andsupportive family along with every material advantage except social acceptance. A popularkid at school, at home Kay longed for a complete family around her Christmas tree and atfamily gatherings. Ellis, on the other hand, grew up yearning for someone with whom he couldjust hang out.“No biggie. Look, we agreed back in the diner that I’d lighten you up and you’d keep me

focused.” She lightly flicked a rubber band in his direction. “So lighten up!” Ellis ducked hishead and started to laugh just as their supervisor walked in.An hour later, Ellis and Kay were on a bus headed toward a meeting of a service coalition

across town. After that they’d be meeting with kids who might be part of a youth council forthe afterschool program. Their assessment had been a big hit with the director and her boss.“Kay, this stuff looks good, I think, most of it anyway. This will be the first youth council I’veworked with since I was on one in high school!” He paused for a second. “What issue do youthink they’ll want to work on?”“We’ll soon find out! I’m hoping they will go for jobs like we suggested in the assessment,

but you never know.” She looked over at Ellis and smiled. “And don’t forget about these pro-fessionals, my friend. This coalition needs your expertise on data mining. I already told the coor-dinator about you. When she saw your demographic comparisons between school districts, shereally got excited. They are trying to come up with a longer-range plan for better funding, andshe’s sure you can help.” Kay also had shown the coalition leader their community assessmentas a way of demonstrating what Ellis was capable of.“Hey, did you show her the cool information you got from those kids? You really got them

to open up in no time. Not everybody can get kids to talk about their pressures at home. Thatinformation made it possible for us to advocate for the job creation program and youth coun-cil. Those kids can take on a real issue that affects their lives for the short and long term.”

FRAMING THE ISSUE: INITIAL STEPS

While on the bus, Kay and Ellis began discussing a central focus for macro practice: fram-ing issues in ways that both capture people’s attention and get them to commit to action.Beginning with their own community assessment, they were hoping the kinds of issuesrelated to jobs for kids would draw the youth council’s energy and activism. Unlike a socialproblem, which can be real but does not in itself lead to concreteness, specificity, or action(Alinksy, 1989; Homan, 2004; Rubin & Rubin, 2007), an issue for an organizer is like yeastfor a baker. Once agreed to, an issue rises to the top of a group’s agenda because it con-tains enough self-interest to create self-motivation, has concreteness so that it can be actedupon, and, with work, becomes specific enough that it can be achieved and built upon bythe group over the long haul (Homan, 2004; Rubin & Rubin, 2004; Staples, 2004). Becauseof their community assessment, Ellis and Kay moved from discussing data on poverty inCentral Harlem—a real problem without any focus or specificity—to an issue like jobs forthe afterschool program kids. Whether they could convince the young people that this wasan issue they also cared about was a lot of the work that lay ahead for Ellis and Kay. Wewill return to their work on issue development with the young people later in the chapter.

99Chapter 4 Framing the Issues Within the Community

“Yeah, well, if that’s the issue that gets ’em going. You never know, though. They’re greatkids. But get ready, Ellis, it won’t be that simple. A lot of the kids will need some one-on-onework to get ready for job interviews. Do you know some of these kids have never even been outof Harlem? They’ll need casework as much as jobs.”“Casework? Uh uh,” Ellis looked at his new friend warily. “I’m not into that. One-on-one is

not for me and what I want to do.”“Yeah, well, our supervisor Ms. Fortes gave us both a day a week on individual work. You

knew that when you signed up.”“I know, I know. Because of you, I’m gonna try. But I’ll need your help. Damn, I thought

macro practice was just that—macro, major, the big kahuna. I signed up to work on the condi-tions that affect people’s lives, not their daily hassles. Youth councils fighting for jobs, that Ilike. How each kid feels about it . . .” he shrugged and looked downcast.“Look, I’m not comfortable with data, but I know it’s important. You help me, and I’ll help

you, okay?”“Yeah, sure, I’m with you.” Ellis sighed as they got off the bus, then smiled a wry grin. “Truth

is, I got issues with some issues, Kay.” They both laughed. “I just thought social work would bea lot easier than this!”

This chapter has started here with the specificity of actions as a way to ground read-ers in significant issues that matter to their work. You should refer to it as the chapterissues develop. The chapter moves quickly to a wider and more difficult set of issues: howto develop a practice model that breaks away from the dichotomies between individualand group work so that an intuitive practitioner like Kay and an intellectual practitionerlike Ellis each develop the necessary set of complementary skills that can make their prac-tice transformational—for themselves and for the people with whom they work. To thatend, this chapter will work toward achieving its own set of objectives:

• To show how to unite the social and the personal regardless of method;• To examine how there is value rather than a cause for pessimism in working with both

the strengths and limitations of one’s objective organizing situation;• To demonstrate how to utilize both intuitive and intellectual skills to expand one’s

ability to grapple with social and interpersonal dynamics at play in one’s practice;• To discuss how to use one’s own tactical self-awareness and appreciation for one’s

own strengths and limitations to develop tactical flexibility and diminished adher-ence to outmoded or romanticized, ineffective strategies.

ISSUES ABOUT ISSUES: THE HISTORIC DEBATE IN SOCIAL WORK

While Kay and Ellis’s discussion began with issue formation, it soon evolved to one that isas old as the profession of social work itself: Is the issue at hand to be thought of as indi-vidual or community in focus? After all, how one answers the question often determines the


EXERCISE

Define a social problem that has come from your community assessment:

_______________________________________________________________________________

Break the problem down into a manageable issue:

• Concreteness:• Specificity:• Actions:

� 1.

� 2.

� 3.

way one analyzes an issue in the first place (Lowery, Mattaini, & Meyer, 2007; Saleebey,2008). Kay and Ellis’s brief discussion reflects one of the longest-running debates withinsocial work. Whether the warring followers of Jane Addams and Mary Richmond,Flexner’s (Bonner, 2002) near-hundred-year-old dictum of “from case to cause,” or the1970s split into macro and micro practice, this profession has sought to resolve how bestto work with those in need. For community-based practitioners, the struggle can seemunique: Do we do anything clinical? Is it all about the “social” in social work? How do Ibring these two issues together . . . should I even bother? Ellis’s discomfort with one-on-oneinteraction and Kay’s unease in front of data sets could lead each to opt out of what a com-munity group or individual actually seeks to work on. Is there a way to avoid making whatwould be the wrong method choice for an important issue because of the professional’s per-sonal discomfort with that choice?

These questions reflect one of the underlying crises of social work practice: the inabil-ity to describe a developed practice framework that adequately reflects the daily concernsof the social work practitioner and the community member(s) he or she is working withwithout sacrificing the historical claims of the field. An established macro text capturesthis dilemma powerfully:

Given the complexity of macro interventions, practitioners may begin to feel over-whelmed. Is it not enough to do good direct practice or clinical work? . . . Ouranswer is that professional practice focusing only on an individual’s intra-psychicconcerns does not fit the definition of social work. Being a social worker requires see-ing the client as part of multiple, over-lapping systems that comprise the person’ssocial and physical environment. . . . Social workers unwilling to engage in somemacro-practice types of activities when the need arises are not practicing social work.Similarly, social workers who carry out episodes of macro practice must understandwhat is involved in the provision of direct services to clients at the individual, domes-tic unit, or group level. (Netting, Kettner, & McMurtry, 2007, p. 18)

The importance of developing and then utilizing a practice framework capable of hold-ing both micro and macro perspectives without succumbing to abstract notions of what oneshould do has never been greater. This is no small matter, for it is clear today that practi-tioners and community members alike are facing a set of economic and political demands forcontraction of services and shrinkage of the social welfare state. With the economy in free fall,practitioners have no guarantee that our society will meet, however slowly, the demands ofthe disenfranchised and poor. None of us can expect our practice, regardless of method choice,to easily connect client/community need with an accessible, responsive social welfare system.Indeed, if the worker cutbacks and the withdrawal of entitlements of the last 25 years aremeasures of a system’s responsiveness, we can expect that heightened community needs willbe met with a mix of organizational resistance (more cost containment) joined to ideological


indifference (more political support for privatization and individual effort). Social service cut-backs continue to be a major threat in the early 21st century across the United States(Bernstein, 2008).

The early 21st-century crisis of our political and economic marginality is reflected inour ongoing crisis in practice framework development. Some models do make clear thatthere are practice constraints created by fiscal issues. As Netting et al. (2007) put it:

Decision makers often consider cost even before the urgency or necessity of achange. This means the change agent must understand how such decisions aremade . . . and address cost issues in advocating for change. (p. 341)

Working with a generalist practitioner framework, the authors carefully delineate the nec-essary skills of a social work macro practitioner operating within those constraints. Theiranalysis goes on to develop a practice picture of a social worker’s highly successful entry andengagement inside the various systems of social welfare that may unintentionally underplay thedegree of struggle workers must face to do meaningful work. Likewise, their work has beenhelpful in delineating macro practice work into “episodes” so that the new practitioner can seethe variety of arenas in which she or he will work. A real advance over the last two decades,their work allows practitioners to try on skill sets necessary for effective community-basedwork. What remains is to see what actually may be going on inside each stage of community-based work, the weave of case and community, that informs daily practice. The day-to-dayreality of social workers inside agencies struggling with cost containment and increased clientneed is that there is another side to daily practice: frequent, angry resentment toward over-worked workers, frustration at bureaucratic red tape and other nonsensical regulations, thepain at seeing clients and communities suffer while needed services are cut back . . . all thewhile living with the awareness that these micro issues often get in the way of long-term orga-nizing efforts. As one worker said, “How do I get back to fighting the cause of the disease whenI can’t even get enough Band-Aids to treat the wound?”

The frustration wrought by the dilemma of too few resources and too many needs con-tinues to be what it was 25 years ago: Over time, too many practitioners, while wanting tomaintain their macro systems/resource skills, begin to sharply divide up their practice lives.Some see interpersonal change as too secondary for their concern and opt for organizing workthat emphasizes only political strategies, seeing themselves fighting antiglobalization strugglesthrough their volunteer work alone. Others (in greater numbers) decide that meaningful workcan only be found through treatment and become private practitioners or, more likely withtoday’s HMO plan restrictions, part-time private practitioners who make extra money in theevening while tiredly holding on to a direct-service job during the day.

Both groups feel the other’s choice is a waste of time. The attempt to find new ways formeaningful practice is sacrificed on the divided altar of either organizing/or clinical paths ofwork. As I will address in the latter half of this book, this same false division can happen to


some organizers who move on to administrative positions, feeling their organizing daysbelong to the distant time of their politicized youth.

Some of the best organizing literature has encountered this problem. Ross’s (1967) clas-sic work mentions the importance of understanding process in community work, even men-tioning a community practitioner’s clinical role. However, the term is meant metaphorically,with “diagnosis” extended to community problems at large—a nice way of redefining one’spolitical assessment skills, but hardly the type of skill that looks at the specifics of the prac-tice process itself.

Happily, present-day texts recognize the importance of relationships, going on to stressthat building them is of enormous value. For example, Eichler’s (2007) work on consensusorganizing has a number of delightful stories about how relationships improve organizingstrategy. He goes on to nicely explore the basis for how friendship and organizing relation-ships are built, with an emphasis on reciprocity, or mutual sharing of tasks and responsibili-ties. For him, recognizing the value of relationships as a key to organizing strategy is essential.

However, even here the focus on relationships in organizing remains at the level of art,of something intuitively learned. New practitioners are still left to ponder how one system-atically develops the listening, engagement, and relationship skills needed to build long-term and effective community-based interventions. Left at a descriptive level of what to do,new practitioners adapt an either organizing/or clinical stance because most frameworksstill stress, at least implicitly, that such dichotomies exist, that since caseworkers deal withindividuals, it is primarily interpersonal work; for organizers, who work with communities,the emphasis must be socio-political and task based. (As Ellis might say, even relationshipsbecome a task!)1

Other recent works go on to focus on relationship building in terms of leadershipdevelopment. For example, Sen and Klein (2003) write of how organizers must distinguishdevelopment from identification of leaders:

Identification requires matching a person’s skills to tasks, but not much more.Development is more time consuming and riskier. It requires reflection andplanning as well as systematic teaching . . . it requires helping people thinkthrough who they want to be, as well as who they are in this moment; havingsome knowledge of a leader’s learning style and history; and designing a cycleof learning that makes room for diverse styles. (p. 18)


1Some recent texts continue to frame relationship building into a task focus that implicitly becomescanned and mechanistic. See, for example, Joan Mineeri and Paul Getos’s Tools for Radical Democracy(2007), in which they write about recruitment of new members by “developing a rap,” listing eightsteps to be covered in a five- to seven-minute conversation (introduction, self-interest, accomplish-ments, political education, agitation, call to action, commitment, and data collection). While cer-tainly inclusive, the focus on so many tasks in such a short time frame leads to abstracting the veryrelationships that we need to build before they have even begun!

Their work goes on to stress a set of task-based assignments that allow leaders todevelop a powerful voice, weaving in attention to cultural dynamics as well so that thetype of leadership that emerges in a group is reflective of the larger population one hastargeted to reach.


Working with the issue you identified at the beginning of the chapter:

What are its concrete tasks?

(a) ________________________________________________________________

(b) ________________________________________________________________

(c) ________________________________________________________________

In thinking about process, how well are people working together?

______________________________________________________________________

In what ways would the process of the work be improved through improved relation-ship building?

______________________________________________________________________

?REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS

Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, and Flowers (2004) wrote about this dilemma:

Our normal way of thinking cheats us. It leads us to think of wholes as madeup of many parts, the way a car is made up of wheels, a chassis, and a drivetrain. In this way of thinking, the whole is assembled from the parts and dependson them to think effectively. . . . (However), unlike machines, living systems,such as your body or a tree [or a community] create themselves. They are con-tinually growing and changing along with their elements. . . . what seems tan-gible is continually changing. (p. 22)

As the enormity and rapidity of global change confront us daily in a multiplicity ofimages, types of information, and varied platforms, macro practitioners, too, need formsof learning that end the outmoded dichotomies of the past and replace them with, asSenge et al. (2004) suggest, “deeper levels of learning (that) create increasing awareness

of the larger whole—both as it is and as it is evolving—and actions that increasinglybecome part of creating alternative futures” (p. 23).

To do this means we have to change traditional practice frameworks that, while begin-ning with a firm declaration of placing the individual within a social context, neverthelessdescriptively ignore the concrete realities of how systems really affect practice or whatimpact people and their personal needs have on organizing itself.

The real world of 21st-century social work practice is much less tidy on the ground.As its messiness cannot be avoided, it therefore has been all too often neatly divided upbetween types of practitioners: Caseworkers and clinical social workers feel, and engageinterpersonally with emotions; organizers and macro practitioners think, and engage inpolitical strategy with thoughtful tactics. Such dichotomies can occur within macro prac-tice as well: Administrators deal with accountability systems from above, with funders andtheir quantifiable outcomes; organizers respond to accountability flowing from below,with people and their social conditions and needs.

Through this overemphasis on difference in methods, there is a resultant loss of devel-oping complementary skills across methods as a richer form of intervention. Instead, thesharp separation between individual and community work is then perceived as a necessaryadaptation to the hard realities of the real world rather than an unfortunate limiting ofhow people must learn, reflect, and act on the world. If, as Senge and his colleagues (2004)suggest, we must learn to see the world as whole, don’t we need a practice framework thatassumes we will observe and then act on the whole as well?

OBSERVING AND ACTING ON THEWHOLE: INNOVATIONS IN PRACTICE

This impasse between methods (or tracks) can be diminished by experimenting with highlyinnovative frameworks for practice. What follows, flowing out of my own experience asan organizer, in work with human service managers and executives, and with students ofcommunity practice, was first called “the other side of organizing” and can be extendedto “the other side of management” as well. As I have learned, this other side—the inter-personal, emotional realities of practice life—is directly, simultaneously connected to theexternal, strategic community work being carried out as an organizer in the streets, com-munity coalitions, and agency meetings in which one works.

To incorporate both sides remains a primary goal of my work. Doing so has demandedthe use of a framework different from the standard models of practice that perhaps too eas-ily separated micro from macro. A framework open to the demands of the dynamic flow ofthe 21st century calls for any practitioner’s active understanding and use of both communityand casework principles and techniques. Moving away from a dichotomy between methodsand tracks to an appreciation of their interdependence within the same client-and-community


engagements then led me to a deeper awareness of the similarities in their approach as theyengaged with their clients (whether those were individuals or communities). This in turn chal-lenged me to explore how every practitioner can incorporate these similarities into his or herwork in a far more holistic and dynamic interplay between the individual and the communityor agency in which he or she works or lives.

Finally, in trying to join the theoretical works of such divergent writers as Freire,Rothman, Saleebey, and Wheatley, there was a re-examination of how one experientiallycombines theory and practice into a transformational framework hopefully capable ofblending the personal/individual and social/community dimensions of practice into anactive, engaging system that discards method/track dichotomies in one’s professional life.

What follows is thus first a description of what this kind of practice actually looks likeand how it is done. The material also focuses on how one joins presumably personal andstrategic issues consistently in one’s work, regardless of method. Finally, I attempt to movebeyond a description of the practice to present the outlines of a consistently engaged,transformational framework that lies underneath all forms of practice, whether one isworking with an individual or a community group. It is hoped that this paradigm containswithin it a partial outline of the kind of dynamic practice that can prepare social workpractitioners for the real work we face in the early 21st century.

THE MACRO PRACTITIONER’S ROLE: THE SOCIALCONSTRUCTION OF “WHERE THE PEOPLE ARE AT PLUS ONE”

Every organizing situation is focused through the prism of societal conditions. Some ofthem are historical and relate to the epoch in which one is living (Bush conservatism andneoliberal market ideology, Obama’s transformative, interventionist governmental modelleaning toward economic redistribution and social equality); others relate to the immedi-ate resources and activity of a neighborhood or particular organization (what theschools’ reading and math scores are like, how many children of the neighborhood are inthe child welfare system). Their combined objective nature—a globalized economy thatdeepens income inequality within the community, the level of dollars spent on childrenwithin that school district—interacts with people’s dominant ideas, attitudes, and beliefsand their ensuing strategic responses to create a general sense among people of what isand what we can do.Each period’s objective reality exists in part because people come to perceive those

conditions as fixed. The natural responses of people to adapt themselves to those perceivedrealities reinforce each other in mutually supportive ways: “What is” remains that waybecause people choose to act, for better or worse, in accordance with those perceptions,making daily life that much easier to understand and act on. As Berger and Luckmann(1967) wrote in their classic The Social Construction of Reality:


Habitualized actions retain their meaningful character for the individual althoughthe meanings involved become embedded as routines in his general stock ofknowledge, taken for granted by him and at hand for his projects in thefuture. . . . And by providing a stable background in which human activity mayproceed with a minimum of decision-making most of the time, it frees energy forsuch decisions as may be necessary on certain occasions. (p. 41)

Thus, in the 1960s and early 1970s, people wanting to change things acted in termsof powerful social movements able to deliver substantial reform. Later in the mid-80s,AIDS activists did the same, albeit without as much other social movement support, tolead the fight against corporate profiteering related to HIV-AIDS treatments and medi-cines. Today in the early 21st century, activists in the United States are in flux as thehabitualized actions of the previous 25 years—the way folks get used to looking atthings—give way to exciting yet ambiguous opportunities born of profound change inour political economic discourse (see Chapter 1), an economy in free fall, a shrinkingnonprofit center, deepening populist anger at the wealthy and finance sectors of our soci-ety, and an American people looking to an African American president to lead them outof an economic and social morass not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Inevitably, the combined impact of available resources, popular ideas, perceptions ofwho has the authority to make decisions, and the level of organizing activity throughoutour communities reinforce each other in ways that structure how organizers and activistswill seek change. Thus, while knowing that this period’s dominant conditions are explod-ing with rapid change, good practitioners still ground their strategic stance in the objec-tive conditions before them. To do otherwise would be to stand outside the experiencesand expectations of the people with whom one is working—hardly an effective way inwhich to work.

That the strategic outcomes sought at the local level can seem modest in compari-son to what is occurring at the national level does not mean they are less compellingor less important. They are designed to fit within what is, based on the actualresources, time, and involvement of the people one is working with. Therefore, whilecast in the objective mold of the community strategist assessing more limited resourcesand fiscal options compared to either her or his ’60s counterpart or the Obama admin-istration, an organizer is actually confronting the same subjective problem in her or hiswork: where people are at. By definition, today’s organizers in the United States aresetting out to change the habitualized perceptions of 21st-century groups so that theirorganizing efforts will be as tactically effective as possible today rather than beingbased on either some time in the distant past or the faraway future.

Regardless of where or when one is active, our organizing role is thus a statement ofopposition to the ways in which things are perceived and structured. This implicit stancewith the community group he or she is working with immediately creates a primary


contradiction in an organizer’s life: You must be where the people are at . . . plus one.If all you are is where the people are, they don’t really need you, do they? At the sametime, if you’re where the people are at . . . plus three, the people will inevitably frus-trate you or lead you to manipulate them for your own ends. “Where the people are atplus one” creates the active tension between respect (for where they’re at) and chal-lenge (in the “plus one” of new possibilities that makes organizing meaningful).

Thus, an organizer is almost always a little out of sync, organizationally and per-sonally, with those with whom he or she works. In periods of quiet, when the orga-nized expression of our community members’ concerns is diffuse and even passive, weare actively working to give energetic form to the ongoing work. Here we are heavilydirective and purposefully dynamic; our activism compliments their less certain, morepassive response. Eventually, however, events begin to shift; people are excitinglyengaged in all sorts of activity. Now our roles seem transformed; we perceive the needto emphasize constraint, perhaps caution, at various large-scale tactical suggestionsemanating from the group. Then the process begins to repeat itself. (This clearly is atplay after the election of Barack Obama and the fall of the American financial andmanufacturing systems, where local community people have moved from passiveacceptance of the conservative status quo to populist anger and condemnation ofthese economic leaders.)

In each case, your role as an organizer creates a certain organizational and personaltension within the mix of resources, perceptions, and strategic alternatives within yourgroup and your work with it. This tension creates enough dynamism to keep the groupmoving forward as effectively as possible—always seeking a perfect fit within that mixturethat never subsides into either resigned passivity (“There’s nothing we can do”) nor agi-tated frustration (“Why the hell aren’t more people joining this important fight?”).

The need for this organizational tension means that we often will go through anorganizing experience being just a touch outside of most others’ organizational percep-tions and experiences. If an organizer is not aware of the implicit personal tension sucha role demands, the result is often either unnecessary personal estrangement leading toelitism or harmful organizational ineffectiveness based on romanticism and naiveté. Aswe shall see, neither need occur.


Examine your role in relationship to a group with which you are working, preferably onthe issue identified at the beginning of the chapter. In what way are you “where thepeople are at plus one”? How do you demonstrate respect for where they are at? Howdo you demonstrate challenge through “plus one”?


An example of these organizing dynamics occurred when I was doing tenant organiz-ing on the West Side of New York a number of years ago. At first, everything and every-one was uninspired: People rarely came to meetings, apathy hung in the air like a thermalinversion, and there were more diverse issues on our agenda than there were tenants in thebuilding. Because of the quiescent time, I knew I had to somehow activate their concerns,however modestly framed, into tangible issues. Regardless of the group’s initial amor-phousness, as organizer it was my job to make our group real, make it live in some way,or otherwise the whole effort would be lost. Initially I spent most of my energy just con-vincing people to show up to weekly meetings. “Plus one” was convincing people it wasworth their while to attend a two-hour meeting on a Tuesday night to discuss housingcode violations with a local government official rather than stay home and watch TV.

It was not an easy time, those long, long months of October and November. Thisperiod is what others have called the preorganizing phase of organizing when one’stime is spent convincing individuals to attend meetings, being positive about futuregains, leading by modest example—being what has been described as the “enabler”(Rothman, 2008). However, when one is a new practitioner, it’s also a period of nailbiting, bouts of depression, and long nights with a friend mulling over why you evergot into organizing in the first place. In my case, for all my knowledge of pre-phases,I was a wreck.

Then, suddenly, things began to happen. One night, the group transformed itself froman apathetic gathering into a concise, tightly knit organization that very definitely wantedto go on rent strike—indeed, wanted to spend its rent money on needed repairs—thatnight! They had rushed by me, organizationally, leaving my tidy, efficient plans for col-lating all recent rent code violations in disarray. I was soon running to catch up with them,trying to figure out ways to keep the energized group going but struggling to add a dropof caution to their efforts. Getting to where the people are at plus one means respectingand joining the intense activism with a challenge to do it in ways that will keep themomentum going over the long haul and not just for a brief, exciting moment or two. (Inthis case, if they hadn’t filed the code violations first, all their rent money would have stillbeen owed to the landlord, even if they’d spent the funds to fix terrible violations.)

But that rush from disinterested apathy to intensive activism does not just happen. Itis created by the push of objective conditions (in the above case, the elevator broke downfor the fourth time in two months) that had become harsh enough to necessitate a dra-matic alteration of the group’s collective consciousness. Given both the previous organiz-ing work and the developing changes in objective conditions, previously unconsciousfeelings and urgings—what Fritz Perls (1973) called unfinished business and Reich andBaxandall (1972) called the unresolved contradictions of capitalism—were raised toconcretely seek new forms of activity that demanded immediate responses. As one tenantput it, “Look, I’ve been feeling bad about this place for a while but never put it together.


I shouldn’t have to feel bad and walk those dammed stairs, too! I feel fine now, and angry,because I see I have a right to that elevator! So let’s get it fixed tonight!!”

It’s only natural that an organizer, having been mired in the small routines of every-day organizing, will often trip in the rush to catch up with a group’s heightened activism.And why shouldn’t we stumble a bit? As implied by Berger and Luckmann (1967) earlier,initially the routinization of the organizer’s daily activity had been created by the group’spassivity. Such routines of a lot of what an organizer does—the work is necessary but alittle boring—can cut the organizer off from more radical impulses to move the group intodynamic (and, in all honesty, more emotionally satisfying) forms of confrontation with thelandlord around the building’s problems.

In such times, we’re right to be hesitant, for any good organizer will base strategicdecisions on resources and people’s engagement in the issues at hand rather than onwhimsy. In truth, it hurts emotionally to throttle the desire to advance a group rapidlyin its development because your tactical awareness says you must slow down. Ugh!After a few bruises, you don’t move so quickly. Underneath that emotional pain is animportant point: All the actions that train a community practitioner in daily organiza-tional skills (how to follow up with new members, leaflet preparation, etc.) also socializehim or her to levels of expectation—both personally, in effectiveness in motivatingothers, and collectively about what groups are realistically able to accomplish. If thelargest event you’ve ever engaged in involves 50 people, you can’t be immediately pre-pared, personally or organizationally, to deal with 500.

For these reasons, we can often find ourselves suddenly lagging behind everyone else’sexpectations for dynamic activity. The West Side tenants’ group didn’t have any accumulatedexperiences to suggest they were trying to do too much. And we can catch up only if we havea well-developed set of intellectual and intuitive skills that can note the varying—and oftenqualitatively different—shifts in either content (what people want to do) or process (howthey want to do it) that underlie such rapid change. Never have these challenging dynamicsbeen more at play than they are for the community practitioner in today’s tumultuous worldof economic uncertainty and political change. Senge et al. (2004) explain it this way:

How [a living system] recreates itself in social systems such as global institutionsdepends on both our individual and collective level of awareness. . . . As long asour thinking is governed by habit—notably by industrial, “machine age” conceptssuch as control, predictability, standardization, and “faster is better,” we willcontinue to re-create institutions as they have been, despite their disharmonywith the larger world. (p. 9)

Only those capable of developing a practice framework that can see and act on thewhole, as Senge and his colleagues (2004) suggest, can expect to be a meaningful part ofthe transformative change underway in American society.



Reflect on a recent campaign or major activity. Where could your actions have bene-fitted from a reimagining of possibilities rather than the same habits of planning thatperhaps needed a little refreshing? Were new people’s perceptions as valued as thoseof old-timers? Should they be?


FROM PROBLEM TO ISSUE . . . AND BACK AGAIN

Kay and Ellis were back in the diner, coffee cups filled to the brim. They looked at each other,disappointment creased beneath their eyes. After an exciting start, their next youth councilmeetings had been a bust. No one had shown up at the subcommittees they’d excitedlypromised to work on.“Man, this sucks! What happened here? At the first youth council meeting, the kids were so

great! I was sure they liked the issue they’d chosen.” Ellis picked at the plain bagel he’d ordered.“Yeah, geez, they even came up with a name for their group that everybody loved.” Kay was

referring to the Three Bears Youth Council, the name a member had arrived at after the coun-cil had decided one of the problems identified was too small—getting their music at schooldances—and another too large—working with the cops to get drug dealers away from theirschool at the height of the crack epidemic.The group’s final choice had moved from a personal problem to a concrete, actionable

issue, itself captured by a catchy name: Jobs for a Change. All the youth council members hadeagerly signed on to two subcommittees. Ellis’s group members would canvas the neighbor-hood and nearby communities for a list of potential employers, especially larger corporatebusinesses. Kay’s members were focusing on what they and their friends would need for jobreadiness skills, resume writing, and interviewing. The first meeting ended with a few hugs andhigh fives all around.That none of the teenagers came to either subcommittee had jolted the young organizers.“I guess we put too much on them. They’re only kids. We needed to talk with them about

their fears, help prepare them more. I got so excited I forgot to see how they really felt aboutall the work ahead.”“Well, yeah, but I don’t think it’s how the kids felt about themselves here. I started making

all those distinctions about ‘corporate’ and ‘big companies.’ Making the whole thing morecomplicated than it had to be. And then we got into job readiness without even explaining it.Too much stuff, too soon.”

(Continued)

THE HOLISTIC VALUE OF JOINING INTUITIVEAND INTELLECTUAL SKILLS: MICRO MEETS MACRO

Confronted with an unexpected organizing challenge, Kay and Ellis reverted to what eachwas most comfortable with in assessing the problem at hand: Kay was intuitively drawn tothe interpersonal dynamics; Ellis intellectually reviewed the tasks and their interrelated parts.For both of them—and with any practitioner—learning how to be comfortable with bothone’s intuitive and intellectual abilities is a primary challenge if one seeks to develop anengaged, dynamic practice that can observe and act on one’s chosen community. Indeed, oneof the central arguments in this book is that the joining of such abilities is fundamental tothe mastery of what Freire (2000) calls critical reflection—the ability to live within what Icall “the Two Truths of Great Practice”: both acting and reflecting, simultaneously, on one’swork. Great practice is not simply one’s professional ability to choose the right tactical inter-vention. It is equally about developing the personal capacity to live with the dilemmaswrought by whatever correct choice you have made: Too much task creates the dilemmas ofundermining relationships; too much relationship building and the work doesn’t get done.

This is why great practice is so difficult, as such classic theorists in social work educa-tion as Hilgard (1987), Berengarden and Berengarden (1968), and Gitterman and Germain(2008) have noted. Likewise, organizational development theorists like Senge (1994) havefound the same when analyzing management behavior. All people have tendencies to empha-size one mode or the other in their learning style: Some approach learning through the


(Continued)

“I saw Keysha react when we started putting the committees together, but I didn’t stop andask what she was feeling. She looked kinda wary now that I think about it. I was just sopleased by the names and the excitement that I stopped looking at the people.”“If you ask me, it was the content: corporate jobs downtown and uptown, job readiness,

resumes . . . some of them didn’t know what a resume was, but we kept going. There were somany tasks, we took too much for granted.” Ellis drained his coffee cup. “We have to go backto the kids and break the work down into simpler parts. Then let it build from there.”“Maybe we can do that, but I think we need a little debrief on how each of them feels.

I want to follow up one on one before the next council meeting. Find out what’s going onunderneath.”“I’ll get the agenda ready. Do a little legwork myself on some of the businesses. Make the

work clearer, show them actual forms people use to apply for jobs. Back to basics.” They leftthe diner soon after. While there were no high fives, a brief farewell hug let them know theywere on the same path—only the lanes were different.

intuitive, experiential side, others from a more analytical, intellectual point of view.Researchers are now finding that such modes of problem solving reflect the dominance ofone of our brain’s two hemispheres: the right hemisphere, which tends to emphasize spatial,intuitive, and emotional faculties, or the left hemisphere, with its analytical, temporal, andintellectual abilities. Thus, as Berengarden and Berengarden discovered, some people learnby doing and then generalize from their experience; others begin from an intellectual andabstract understanding and then through experience develop greater intuitive skill.The challenge for practitioners, however, is that left unchecked, one’s predominant

personal approach to learning will be reinforced too often as the primary measure of pro-fessional excellence—the singular way by which one approaches problems and how tosolve them. This tendency toward the creation of habitualized problem-solvingapproaches to one’s environment, as Berger and Luckmann (1967) noted again and again,is the inevitable process of seeking equilibrium in an ever-changing world. There is noth-ing wrong with balance, of course, but too often practitioners opt for the personal com-fort in either “only my gut” versus “only my brain” or “individual versus community”rather than the critically reflective balance between intuitive and intellectual skills. Kayneeded to strengthen her attention to task and what needed to get done so that her groupwould not be derailed from actual achievement. Ellis had to focus on his own ability toread the intuitive, personal reasons why young people might have been afraid to take onthe assignments so that group cohesion and membership unity would increase.

All too often in macro practice, intuitive or experientially based processes are down-graded as secondary or lesser skills. Most methodological approaches to practice rewardconsistently only those skills that can be measured in content, which robs a practitioner ofmuch of the credit deserved in her or his work. This then causes her or him to believe thatthe intellectual, rational, and abstract elements of practice are the most valuable when infact both intuitive and intellectual processes are needed.

Equally important, if models of practice infer that intellectual content relates tohigher-order thinking, over time most practice situations will come to be defined primar-ily by their outcome-based content alone, thus once again reinforcing the dichotomybetween strategic and personal factors of practice. The sooner we concretely analyze thevarious ways these two styles of thinking/acting are in fact dual strengths in all practice,the sooner a truly dynamic, strategically and interpersonally charged practice will be pos-sible. Like Ellis and Kay, we all may need a lot of time together over long cups of coffee,tea, or other beverages of your choice for that to happen, but the effort seems worth it.

In short, the joining of our intellectual and intuitive capacities is crucial for everyone’seffective practice. Intuitive skills deepen the practice experience by helping one understandintellectual content in actual application—and vise versa. Paulo Freire (2000) understoodthis as he wrote about the problem-posing requirements of the literacy worker with theilliterate peasant. For him, the transformational nature of his work from a simple illiter-acy project of skilled teachers and illiterate peasants to an organizing prospect led by


social beings acting on the world against the Brazilian dictatorship was possible only asthe worker engaged in genuine relationship with people that was both respectful anddemanding. By using intuitive skills to build authentic relationships with the peasantswhile posing intellectual issues that related to the larger world of which the peasants werea part was demanding and important work. It was a process that required the ongoingdevelopment of peasant and worker alike.


ACTIVITY

• Assess the campaign issue you identified at the beginning of the chapter in terms of whatyou do and do not like to do.

� Like doing: ________________________________________________________________� Dislike doing: _____________________________________________________________

� Like doing: more task/intellectual __________________________________________� Like doing: more process/intuitive _________________________________________� Dislike doing: more task/intellectual _______________________________________� Dislike doing: more process/intuitive _______________________________________

• Reflect on what you can do/learn from others to strengthen one disliked area.

� I commit to making the effort to improve ______________________________________.

Remember: This kind of critical reflection takes long-term effort and is not achieved in oneor two attempts!

On a less dramatic scale, every macro practitioner confronts the same problem in try-ing to sense a group or community’s receptiveness to new and potentially bold tactics, tac-tics one’s own previous organizing efforts suggest are doomed to failure. This happenedwith a group of us who had run a tenants’ union in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After beingpart of a huge rent strike for more than a year (with all the attendant moments of successand failure), I had some difficulty in accepting new militant tactics designed by a fellowsteering committee member to reawaken interest in the tenants’ union throughout the city.She suggested that the union, recently in the doldrums, organize a dramatic run on thelargest bank in the city. This bank, disliked by all students for years due to impersonalservice, had been voluntarily giving rent strikers’ names to landlords, who then placedliens on their accounts. To the woman proposing the event, the run seemed to be a niceblend of political issues and personal antagonisms that could remobilize our efforts. She

based its chances for success on others’ personal antipathy toward the bank, not just thecorrectness of the union’s position on liens.

To many of us, it was a nice idea, bold but potentially embarrassing. Having beenin a lull, all we needed to further lessen our public image and projected clout as astrong tenants’ union was a run on the bank that ran to about $11.86, the sum totalin our individual steering committee members’ accounts. Our skepticism was ratio-nally correct. Students and other community members had been quiet for months, theevent was planned in the middle of a Michigan winter, and our energies were alreadystretched thin. With the organizer’s eye for detail, we observed all the organizationallimits to success. Our understanding of previous situations had served us well; we hadbuilt a strike with more than 1,000 members and an escrow fund of what today wouldbe more than a million dollars and had maintained enough of our initial dramatic suc-cess to build a respected tenants’ organization. There had been a great deal of initialfervor, but the ongoing success was due to the organizers’ attention to the painstak-ing detail of day-to-day routines.

The routine—a routine we were comfortable with, regardless of our radical posture—was antithetical to the boldness of the act. Yet 1,100 people withdrew what today wouldbe more than $250,000 in one afternoon. Soon, the bank was forced to close its doors toother customers, all of which was duly reported on television, radio, and in papers acrossthe state. The success went beyond our wildest expectations and gave the tenants’ unionnew members, greater clout in the community, and needed encouragement to carry on.As one new member put it, “This thing (the bank run) really hit a nerve. My landlorddoesn’t matter to me one way or the other, but I hate this bank—and that lien stuff stank.When I saw a chance to bother them like they’ve bothered me, I figured ‘why not?’ andtook my money out. Now I think I’ll join the union. Hell, it feels good to get one for ourside” (italics mine).

It is only by understanding those feelings and giving shape to them, tactically, that anorganization’s leadership can remain on top of its work. In our case, it had taken onewoman, pulling the rest of us reluctantly along, to state again and again the people wouldlike our demonstration. She had based her plan on both her intellectual skills in organiz-ing previous events and on an intuitive hunch caused by discussions she gleaned from stu-dents that they would identify the bank run with their own personal experiences. She wasright. By trusting her mix of abilities, she had pushed the union to the forefront of city pol-itics again. It never would have happened if we had relied on what many of us “knew”was best.

On a far larger scale today, is evident that the election of Barack Obama, himself a com-munity organizer, followed a similar path of intuitive insight beyond the externally defined lim-its of the early 21st century—some argued that history called him—and intellectual brilliance(his Internet-based fundraising was nothing short of spectacular, and technically brilliant).


THE NEED FOR CRITICAL REFLECTION: DEALING WITH REALCONSTRAINTS BY ADMITTING TO PERCEIVED LIMITS

As the above examples suggest, the organizer (or administrator) will always be coming upagainst certain perceived barriers to ongoing effectiveness. Besides objective factors (availabilityof economic resources and political alliances, etc.), we also face either disinterest from those aroundus, which forces a highly routinized response, or, in periods of excitement and mass activity, abreakdown of the boundaries of formal organization. Only if an organizer forces herself or him-self to consistently explore how these larger organizing processes are interconnected with theday-to-day work can she or he expect to remain effective for any extended period of time.

Challenging and testing one’s own set of behaviors and attitudes is hard work. But if anorganizer can accept the dilemma that says organizational success always demands that heor she limit personal adherence to any one tactic, then the strategic tension between ends andmeans will lessen. As the run-on-the bank example suggests, we risk less in not being com-mitted, personally and organizationally, to one tactical maneuver. Our organizations canonly gain in their long-term strategic effectiveness. This strategic and personal irony is not aseasy to avoid as it seems, for successful tactics, like a comfortable pair of old shoes, aren’teasy to part with. The tactical errors that develop, then, are harder to notice because our ownsense of fit betrays our ability to identify other’s misgivings.

Such mistakes usually fall into two categories. The first, common to newer macro prac-titioners, is based on a romanticized commitment to highly intense, emotionally satisfyingevents in the past. (Often these events were those that crystallized their interest in organizing.)Such romanticism creates what Paulo Freire (2000) has called naive consciousness:

an oversimplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by under-estimationof the common man; by lack of interest in investigation; by a strong tendencytoward gregariousness; by fragility of argument; by a strongly emotional style; bythe practice of polemics rather than dialogics; by magical explanations. (p. 18)

These characteristics could be easily applied to many of us active in the student left inthe early 1970s and repeated by various antiglobalization activists today, particularlyin the application of militancy. For example, having effectively used protest tactics earlierin the 1960s, we’d begin our later strategy where the others had ended: with nonnego-tiable demands and militant demonstrations. The same has happened presently as well,especially in antiglobalization efforts where American activists transpose tactics fromLatin America and other parts of the world, where long-term movements are joined toeven longer conditions of recognized oppression (Sen & Klein, 2003). Rather than retracethe entire set of long and often frustrating procedures that in fact had legitimated much ofour later protest, we’d begin where we’d experienced final success—success we felt wecould relive almost spontaneously. An acquaintance remembered what happened a fewweeks after a successful sit-in for a student bookstore at a Midwest campus:


We were ecstatic. We’d fought for two years to get the bookstore, and the sit-intipped the issue in our favor. To us the administration looked stupid, and welooked strong. Two weeks later, with our sense of power, we decided to get rid ofa really reactionary dean. Rather than think the whole thing through, we allimmediately decided to take over his office until he quit. We were really certainwe’d win—we were so cocky, we actually were looking for a fight to keep the“student struggle going.” And we didn’t get anywhere—it was a new issue, newpeople, and we really needed new ideas. Nobody listened to us in the slightest!

This tactical error need not be based on militancy to create this overly emotional com-mitment to a particular tactic, be it petitioning, bargaining consensually, or whatever.Rather than analyzing what the organizing situation needs tactically, the organizer withnaive consciousness will analyze how the tactic can fit into any situation.


In reviewing your recent campaign or administrative activity, how are some of the tacticsor procedures romanticizing where the people are at or assuming levels of engagement/opportunity greater than those that actually exist?

How might they be refreshed by a new mix of intuitive and intellectual reflection joinedto actions?

________________________________________________________________________


The other major organizing mistake that mirrors the above is based on commitmentsto outdated tactics that once fulfilled particular institutional needs. Personal commit-ments like these create what Freire (2000) calls fanaticized consciousness (I prefer staticconsciousness). These errors are common to organizers who have worked in situationsdemanding high levels of accountability inside their agencies. Often found within largerorganizations, such practitioners wed themselves to procedures that grow outdated andinappropriate for new groups but are still upheld as the organizations’ measure of suc-cessful goal displacement. But the fluidity of organizing makes this tactical pattern sub-tly misleading. If anything, it verifies the procedures and old content of past programs asthe measure of new organizing programs’ success. One organizer, still active in the set-tlement house movement, recalled her consternation when she realized how bored hergroup of retired unionist seniors were at her overly formalized approach to their work:

God, I suddenly saw how bothered they were with me! I’d been running meetingsas I’d been trained, filing reports based on officers elected and even . . . what spe-cific skills related to organizing (that) people were learning. . . . Real good exam-ples of leadership training but not much about their needs and how they weren’tbeing listened to. They weren’t being listened to. They weren’t coming aroundmuch until one person told me they’d had enough of “that stuff” in their unionmeetings! They wanted a chance to talk and socialize. . . . My supervisor wasn’tpleased with the vague reports, but I had to change.

Here, rather than forcing a tactic into any situation, the organizer undercuts the nat-ural development of the situation by substituting previously used, formalized proceduresin the organizing process.


In reviewing your recent campaign or administrative activity, where are some of the tac-tics or procedures outmoded, that is, based on unexamined assumptions from the pastand imposed on the present?

Where might they be refreshed by a new mix of intuitive and intellectual reflection?

________________________________________________________________________


Each organizing error carries with it an unrecognized rigidity: the former has lim-its because it is based on only one’s gut desires; the latter fails because of too muchrationality. Real strategic effectiveness therefore demands that we develop the necessaryblend of intuitive feeling and intellectual thought—what Freire (2000) calls criticalreflection—that necessarily combines thought and action. Over time, the practitionergrows comfortable with the engaged use of thought that he or she is doing so that“reflection and action become imperative when one does not erroneously attempt todichotomize the content of humanity from its historical forms” (Freire, 2000, p. 52).

At the diner, Ellis and Kay were learning how to be critically reflective by supporting eachother in what the other did best. Rather than a fight over intuitive/interpersonal vs. intellec-tual/task approaches to the work, each began to learn from the other what he or she was notcomfortable with in each of their learning styles and approaches to problem solving.

That it was mechanistic is understandable . . . how else do you learn to accessinformation and problem solving that does not come naturally to you? At this stage

of their careers, the “content of humanity” related both to what the kids felt and towhat the campaign needed to be strategically successful came together through theirjoint appreciation for what each person could do more easily. In this way, collabora-tion, rather than an obligatory technique to get the job done, becomes a foundationfrom which to grow and learn together. What better model for team problem solvingcould those young people receive than the sharing of talents by Kay and Ellis?

Learning at first from others and then from our own work, we blend the intuitive andthe intellectual elements into our actual work to check the power of the other. Theiragenda has room for Kay’s interpersonal dynamics and Ellis’s focus on job-related tasks.Thus, the sweet irony behind less adherence to any one tactic is that by admitting to less,we open ourselves to more tactical application.

Obviously, an organizer’s ability to develop critical reflection depends on a sharplyhoned set of intellectual and intuitive skills that keep her or him open to consistent vari-ation in tactics underlying any long-term, successful organizational plan. Many of thoseintellectual skills relate to invaluable political and technical abilities: being adept at inter-preting economics and political trends, knowing how to prepare grants, learning theplethora of rules and regulations surrounding housing code enforcement, for example.

As developed in the previous two chapters on tactical self-awareness, the ongoing orga-nizing dynamics of critically reflective practice clearly suggest that an organizer’s kitinvolves yourself—your personality, your self-awareness in different situations, and yourintuitive ability to work with varying numbers of people on all sorts of issues (some of themas amorphous as they are deeply personal). It is the combination of personal and strategicdynamics at play at every stage of a macro practitioner’s career that this book is exploring,whether they’re the social dynamics regarding race and gender in the workplace or the clin-ical issues of grassroots organizing. For as any experienced organizer or manager comes tolearn, we all engage in therapy now and then, on the street or in the office.

ORGANIZERS AND CASEWORKERS:FINDING METHOD SIMILARITY THROUGHTHE USE OF PARADOX AND CONTRADICTION

Engaging in such therapy in no way implies a passively reflective stance by which we inter-act with our community members. That would be ridiculous. (Besides, lugging a coucharound to all those late-night meetings would be cumbersome.) However, organizers aswell as managers must disabuse ourselves of the idea that we deal only with macro or com-munity issues. We tend to forget that, like therapists, our concern starts with conditions ofindividual people. It is the means by which we choose to correct that condition that are dif-ferent. That the means are different does not mean they are therefore in conflict with eachother. Ollman (1977) noted this understanding in Karl Marx’s most telling writings:



Marx’s materialism is first and foremost a matter of beginning his study of soci-ety with the “real individual,” who may be viewed strictly as a producer but isjust as often seen as both producer and consumer. . . . He shows that productionand consumption are internally related as aspects of the individual’s materialexistence and that information which generally appears under one heading maybe shifted—to the other with no loss of meaning. Likewise, the “real individual”has both subjective and objective aspects—he feels as well as does—and again,because of this interrelatedness, his life situation can be brought into focus byemphasizing either feelings or actions. (p. 114; emphasis added)

Unlike the organizer, of course, the caseworker usually works in as neutral a setting aspossible so that he or she may more easily engage intimately with another individual. Thisallows emotional issues that develop to be better understood and responded to by the prac-titioner. Social forces are involved, too—the physic stress of unemployment, the trauma ofdenied economic aspirations to one’s children or oneself, and so forth—and they mustbe legitimated and incorporated within the therapeutic process itself (Lundy, 2004).Nevertheless, this deeply engaged clinical process heightens the personal development thatan organizer would not even be able to consider.

While the level of individual responsibility to address emotional content varies, orga-nizers do assume roles that involve us in trying to understand individual people in ourcommunities. Like caseworkers, we need to help people overcome resistance to changeand to lessen their fears about what such changes might bring to their lives. We evaluateindividuals’ capabilities for certain tasks, helping the group choose the right people for theright jobs. By developing a bright, energetic, yet inexperienced young woman to lead acommunity group or helping another capable, highly efficient, and mild-mannered manto grow into a role as an organization’s treasurer, we are emphasizing both personal/intu-itive and intellectual characteristics in our choices as clearly as the therapist who choosescertain personal issues to aid a client in individual emotional growth.

Indeed, many types of therapists sound a lot like organizers. For example, Jay Haley(1991) describes strategic therapy as follows:

Therapy can be called strategic if the clinician initiates what happens during ther-apy and designs a particular approach for each problem. When a therapist and aperson with a problem encounter each other, the action that takes place is deter-mined by both of them, yet in strategic therapy the initiative is by the thera-pist . . . [who] sets goals, designs interventions to achieve those goals, examinesthe responses he receives to correct his approach and ultimately examines the out-come to see if he has been effective. The therapist must be sensitive and respon-sive to the patient and his social field, but how he proceeds must be determinedby himself. (p. 77)

While an organizer is not in a position to assume that type of responsibility, Haley’s(1991) description reads a lot like Rothman’s (2008) synthesis of the “enabler” role incommunity development:

The enabler role is one facilitating a process of problem solving and includes suchactions as helping people express discontents, encouraging organization, nourish-ing good interpersonal relations, and emphasizing common objectives. . . . [He] isone who has been responsible for initiating a growth of initiative in others. He hasbeen party to a process of participant-guided learning of habits of responsibility,of applied intelligence, and of ethical sensitivity. The indigenous process he hasstarted, or helped to start, is one of growth in democratic competencies. (p. 97)

Thus, we can see that while there are clear differences in emphasis between the clini-cian and the organizer, they are more a matter of degree than of irresolvable conflict.

Likewise, Saleebey’s (2008) strengths-based framework for intervention is equallycompatible with the dynamic we seek to establish, as explained here:

[A strengths perspective] assumes that every person has an inherent power that canbe characterized as life force, transformational capacity . . . regenerative potentialand healing power . . . [second] . . . that such power is a potent form of knowledgethat can guide personal and social transformation . . . [third] when people’s positivecapacities are supported, they are more likely to act on those strengths. (p. 18)

As a strengths-based perspective sees that the qualities within an individual are capableof both personal and social transformation, it logically follows that a practitioner’s ability tomove comfortably between strategic interventions for one and strategies for the communityis critical to long-term practice effectiveness.

There is another fundamental methodological similarity between micro and macropractice, a similarity that heightens the importance of both personal and social forcesin all types of social work: All strategic practitioners, be they caseworkers or organiz-ers, methodologically value the use of contradiction or paradox as a primary changeagent in people’s behavior. As we saw with the development of tactical self-awarenessby embracing the permanence of our strengths and the humbling openness to changeour limitations, paradox and contradiction assume simultaneous limitation andgrowth. The caseworker, seeing individual growth limited by personal defense, usesparadox to frustrate the client, forcing the person to find other, deeper sources ofstrength if she or he is to resolve the paradoxical dilemma before her or him. The orga-nizer, on the other hand, seeing collective growth limited by societal defense, uses con-tradiction to frustrate society (or an organized segment of society), helping motivatepeople to go beyond previously imposed obstacles to a richer life.


The therapist seeks to frustrate the individual because the limits are perceived by theclient as good (or at least comfortably familiar: I can’t change); the organizer seeks to frus-trate a segment of society because its present organization is perceived by people he or sheis working with as barriers more powerful and/or legitimate than the people themselves:We can’t win/they have all the power. Each practitioner has recognized the intrinsic yetunderutilized strength in the people with whom he or she is working.

In both cases, they then are designing strategies to expose these defenses for what theyare—not real strength, but structured weakness that can be overcome. However, and thisis the key point, by definition the contradiction embedded in each change situationdemands that the practitioners be responsive to its opposite elements. The caseworkermust legitimate and respect personal defenses, which thus highlights the client’s social con-text; the organizer must respond to the strength of the perceived social limits, which illu-minates people’s personal reactions and defenses.

For example, dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) purposely frustrates clients withproblematic behavior by both respecting them to make the choices they wish to make andletting them know the negative consequences that may follow as they remake old choicesrather than new ones (Linehan & Dimeff, 2001). The DBT therapist has designed an inter-vention based on contradiction. The client is receiving two simultaneous communicationsthat create inner conflict: “You are free to choose to do what you want” and “Choosingwhat you want can harm you if that’s what you want.” As time goes by, it is hoped, suchconflict forces changes in behavior, for the client is empowered to stay stuck in the past orto change.

Working one on one, the initial responses to this kind of paradox wrought by DBT willbe the client’s use of resistance, where well-developed defenses and behaviors are triggered bycontradictory options. For example, some clients may abstract the emotional confusion awayby conceptually analyzing the nuances involved in opposing directives; others might posevarying degrees of helplessness, beseeching the therapist for aid and comfort on totally unre-lated problems; still others will angrily tell the therapist they don’t need her or his help at all.

It is this resistance, whatever its form, that the caseworker seeks to intensify throughparadox. The goal is not to do so for its own sake but to eventually raise other emotionalissues buried beneath the defensive reaction to the mixed choices. These more buried issuesare very powerful, so powerful that the client may have avoided them for years—the veryreal emotional abandonment of a distant parent, the understandable rage wrought by beinga Black child in a predominantly hostile, White society, and so on. Once consciously rec-ognized, this new and painful material is directly worked on until the client becomes morecomfortable with it, integrating this conscious (and no longer traumatic) information intodaily life. Making choices that become positive and healthy becomes easier, not harder.

Yet this therapeutic process is hardly as smooth as the above scenario. It is filled withemotional pitfalls of depression, confusion, and anger that can leave both participantsstymied. Some of this will be due to the strength and complexity of the resistance itself


(intellectualizing, obsessively complaining about other issues, being overly ingratiating,etc.). It is here, in the midst of the struggle to go beyond established resistance, that thetherapist must actively acknowledge both the power of the defenses and the social con-ditions that helped bring them into being. For example, a female client does not createa sense of helplessness under high-achievement situations out of thin air; a sexist soci-ety that bombards women with the double-bind message that if they succeed, they willsuffer for it, also becomes part of the therapy.

The client’s projection of great neediness is very understandable under such conditions.Who wouldn’t feel needy if the choices were either (1) succeed at work and court personalestrangement or (2) avoid personal condemnation and throttle personal desires for self-actualization. Many caseworkers who have known how to validate a client’s social contexthave later reported spurts of further emotional growth. Whether this occurs or not, the valida-tion of another’s social condition understandably deepens the level of mutual trust. As Saleebey’s(2008) strengths perspective suggests, it is a concrete signal of respect, or saying, “Yes, you havesome good (social) reasons to have built up those walls around you, and those walls must havehelped at times. We both must respect that. And now maybe with that respect we can helpbreak those walls down, help cushion our fears as we look deeper at other emotional issues.”

This continuous recognition of social context in personal interactions, even in themidst of paradox, is a necessary element for transformative personal change. As the indi-vidual legitimates past defenses as socially understandable, he or she can more willinglyseek to personally change them. The practitioner’s and client’s use of personal and socialfactors helps a healthier, more self-aware individual emerge.


REFLECTIVE ACTIVITY

Note a community member’s personal issues that may be impacting a group.

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Examine what might be some of the social factors influencing this behavior.

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Plan for a conversation in which these social factors are raised. Practice a way of framing themas part of an individual response that is neither fatalistic (“There’s nothing one can do”) noronly about the person’s individual responsibility.

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Remember: This takes practice, practice, and more practice!

The organizer and macro-based practitioner necessarily use contradiction in a muchdifferent fashion when carrying out a campaign with community members. Rather thanfocusing on conflicted emotions with an individual, she or he emphasizes the contradic-tion between, say, societal obligation (rights, stated goals, etc.) and societal achievement(limited access of Blacks and women to executive positions, lack of actual community par-ticipation, etc.). By using the social paradox (“How can an organization profess opennessand discriminate at the same time?”), the organizer develops a set of tactics to engage peo-ple in both recognizing the paradox and, at the same time, intensifying its elements so thatpeople seek substantial change.

Here, too, the organizer meets resistance. Some people see the problem as too bigand choose to focus on minutiae; others personalize the problems and stridently attackindividuals rather than the problem itself; still others are demoralized and feel power-less. To weaken the resistance, the organizer uses tactics that are metaphors of the socialparadox: The collection of code violations is a concrete action directed toward theongoing differences between obligation (good housing) and achievement (lousy plumb-ing, broken doors, etc.). By motivating the tenants to recognize that the social obliga-tion is based on an agreement with them, the organizer helps create a number of tactics(petitioning, scheduling an on-site visit of housing inspectors, etc.) that more forcefullydemonstrate the contradiction. (The on-site inspector, whether he or she does his job ornot, is a real example of the violated social contract in action.)

Over time, these small tactics, if effectively carried out, also help break down thegroup’s resistance to attempt substantial change. (Here, for example, the demoralizedtenant who said society won’t change sees hope in trying; the one who said the landlordwas too powerful decides the group can take him on.) As the resistance changes toactivism, a new social organization—in this case, a tenants’ group—emerges to help bet-ter our lives.2


2The same process in obverse occurs when tactical commitments are based on the perceived seri-ousness and/or legitimacy of the problems itself. Working in the South Bronx, I have personallyfallen prey to this tendency. For example, when confronted with the lack of jobs for young people,I and others were extremely demanding in our request for aid with city officials even though therewere few political resources at hand to motivate our cause. Here we were using our emotional com-mitment to ending the problem to color our choice and use of tactics, fitting the tactics to the situ-ation more by our anger at injustice than by our analysis of the situation itself.

Both of these tendencies have resurfaced in the use of militancy by anti–World Trade Organizationactivists today. Emboldened by the success of militancy in Seattle in 2001, the same degrees of mil-itancy were applied elsewhere, with far less power and impact, for very similar reasons discussedabove.

Like a casework intervention based on DBT, the organizing is rarely choreographedwith the fluidity and precision of a Balanchine ballet. Often, each tactical suggestionmeets a set of defenses that are frustratingly real in their capacity to immobilize people.It is here that the organizer’s intuitive recognition of people’s perceptions and personal-ized reactions to social conditions becomes important. It may turn out that the tenant’sgloomy perception for change in the building is colored by a difficult marriage; another’stendency to get too angry at wrong targets (for example, blaming the overworked super-intendent rather than the landlord) is based on frustration in a boring job. As the actualday-to-day work goes on, the organizer must be able to learn about such problems, try-ing to help the community group members distinguish between sets of circumstances. Ifthis is done correctly, the group’s motivation and effectiveness will eventually increase.Quite often, as individuals meet some collective success, they become personally moti-vated to try to improve individual problems as well.3

The continuous recognition of personal responses and needs in the midst of socially con-scious strategic action, developed and understood as social contradictions heighten in thecommunity, is a key to any organizer’s success. With her or his help, the community mem-bers begin to differentiate a variety of social and personal problems, becoming increasinglyable to focus directly on the organization’s primary strategic aims. As in the therapeutic rela-tionship, the organizer’s use of social and personal factors helps develop a healthier, moresocially able organization.

HOW ONE USES CONTRADICTION: UNDERSTANDINGTHE DYNAMICS OF CHANGING CONTEXT

The necessary use of contradiction or paradox in any form of strategic practice—micro ormacro—initially places great mental strain on any new practitioner. The caseworker is in anintense personal relationship, yet he or she must develop social awareness to be successful;the organizer works with social problems yet cannot ignore personal issues if those problemsare to be alleviated. Kay and Ellis each have a challenge to overcome!

Understandably, then, the predominant focus of each method creates intrinsic alle-giance to a form of practice that sidesteps less dominant issues. The caseworker who legit-imates social factors may find that the client uses her or his legitimacy as a new defense toavoid deeper emotional issues. The organizer who helps a community member recognize


3I have seen this happen frequently, but I am not arguing that work on one successful organizing ortherapeutic act can be a corrective for all kinds of social and/or personal problems, only that it mayhelp. It certainly has a lot more potential than doing nothing at all!

how personal problems cloud her or his strategic perception may become mired in inter-personal relations that the organization cannot handle. In both cases, it obviously takesmore than the recognition of both social and personal dynamics to be effective: One’s ownself-awareness, an ability to skillfully read changing practice context, and a solid strategicsense that helps a practitioner recognize when everyone must move on to other issues areall of vital importance.

An example should help here. An organizer related his dawning consternation whenhe realized his consumer co-op was becoming so personally focused that it might be unableto expand as originally planned:

One day it hit me that everyone was sitting around and bullshitting about theirindividual family problems to the point the co-op was falling apart. I’d begun therap sessions two months earlier because a few members were having problems ingetting their spouses to help more at home while they were here. Pretty soon, theywere using the sessions for every personal gripe imaginable, and our plans forexpansion were being ignored. . . . We almost didn’t make it out of that mess.

The organizer’s problem was not a mere tactical blunder that could be corrected by asimple return to the organization’s tasks or some abrupt modification in the groupprocess. It was his tendency to dichotomize the practice situation: “We’ve dealt with theco-op (strategic, content-focused issues) in easily separated categories.” As he admitted inlong discussions later, he had been unable to recognize that the larger group situation hadbeen laced with personal implications, just as the predominantly personal situation haddirect strategic and programmatic consequences. Beyond this recognition, however, was amore important error: his more rational reliance on only the content of the problem beforehim—that is, an awkward inability to sense intuitively the underlying, less visible dynam-ics in each situation. What is important to note here is that one can only develop bothattributes if he or she is constantly aware that personal and social, strategic dynamics arealways at play in every practice context. What changes is the predominance of one or theother set of issues, not the absence of either personal or social factors.

As we discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 on tactical self-awareness, the more we developour internal capacity to embrace both what we do well and how such strengths canhumbly reappear as tactical limitations later on, the more likely we maintain an externalflexibility in our tactical and strategic choices. As Senge and his colleagues (2004) wrote,“When people start to see from within the emerging whole, they start to act in ways thatcan cause problems to start to ‘dissolve’ over time” (p. 51).

Thus, if the organizer had been holistically aware of the potential social defensesunderlying an open-ended, personally focused factor like the rap group, the setbacksmight never have occurred. While he would have been out of sync, personally and orga-nizationally, with the group when it first expressed its desire for only informal rap sessions,


the co-op’s unimpaired effectiveness would have made the initial tension he experiencedworthwhile. Being at “plus one” challenges everyone to grow beyond where the peopleare at, practitioner and community member alike.

A more experienced organizer in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn had a very differentexperience with his youth employment group, which has located some jobs for group mem-bers and also has been involved in various community development projects for years. Whilehaving never read Freire, his work was the essence of this organizer’s critical reflection:

We work, and we party later, like they want, that’s what we do! The kids knowwhere I’m coming from, that I make ’em work their butts off if they’re gonna be inthis program, but they know that I’m willing to find out where they’re at, too, to letthem speak their minds as they see things, you know. . . . Every successful or unsuc-cessful event always has a dance scheduled after it—that was their idea, one showthey run. We all have time for personal problems, too, never letting our projects(housing rehabilitation) be the be-all and end-all. That’s the only way we’ve sur-vived, because at times things get very heavy . . . not everyone can get a job, thereare a lot of street hassles going on, you name it. But regardless of the type of stress,I know this group will work, that the kids will stay on the job, even when there’sno immediate pay-off for them or for me. . . . A guy like me has to wear a lot ofhats, that’s all—and let the kids wear a few, too! I make mistakes sometimes, don’talways do everything based on ideas, especially when things aren’t working outright, I go with my gut, too. A person like me has to trust himself inside and out.

This organizer has built a small, effective organization, in part by being aware of boththe personal and social needs of the group, and in using himself “inside and out” to skill-fully weave together personal membership needs within the larger concerns of the organi-zation. There is no artificial separation between skill sets, personal development, or groupdevelopment. For him, it is a given that personal and social problems have to be concretelyattended to, using a variety of his skills—and theirs—to make that often seemingly dis-parate idea a concrete reality. The institutionalization of policies like the parties (an ideacoming from the community members) brings that home to people. Quite simply, the pre-dominant needs of any one moment can never dominate all the time—and thus you needa set of shifting yet complimentary skills to be aware of such needs. A person who trustsherself or himself completely can wear many hats—and method choices—comfortably,and that is the essence of engaged, dynamic practice.

The personal demands needed to develop this form of practice aren’t easy to meetunless they are understood, accepted, and experientially adapted to. Once this happens,the personal tension that leads one to unconsciously adopt much less flexible roles willdecrease, for the demand to dominate any one situation with particular skills or tactics isreplaced with more relaxed expectation to actively engage with predominant yet shifting


needs.Whether one is a caseworker or an organizer, knowing the potential fluidity of thesituation frees one from the constraints of needing total mastery over it.

Other concrete analyses around specific topics need to be developed that will explorefurther these personal, group, and individualized demands within social and political con-texts. Some being worked on now that will add further understanding to our practiceinclude issues related to the tactical use of self in organizing, cultural competency, and theweaving together of interviewing and leadership development techniques; others mustbegin. By venturing into unchartered (indeed, ignored) waters, such work may at timesreach beyond its grasp. But any experienced organizer knows (and has been part of) toomany campaigns and events that could have been strengthened if the practitioner had beenwilling to more fully understand how the dynamics of social and personal change inter-mingle in close, interconnected reality. On a broader scale, the dichotomized worldbetween caseworkers and organizers and between organizers and managers must be nar-rowed if we are to meet the increasing needs and economic constraints forecast for today.

DEVELOPING TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICE: SOME FIRST STEPS

The task described above can only be accomplished through a practice framework capa-ble of incorporating its distinct yet interconnected parts, whether they are analyzed asprocess and task, intuitive and intellectual, or relational and outcome focused.Furthermore, that practice must be able to critically reflect and act upon the tensionswrought by this constantly changing relationship between those parts. I consider such aframework to be transformational in that the changes wrought through this process alterboth the organizing process and the people involved in that change together. (This wouldbe true with casework as well.) Paulo Freire (2000) has noted again and again that suchcritical reflection in one’s work transforms not only those who seek help (or change) butthe helper as well, for the change underway is constantly impacting each participant. Usedby practitioners and activists elsewhere, especially in the developing world, a transforma-tive methodology grounds itself in certain principles that hold tremendous potential forthe social world. The primary ones are spelled out below.

• First, there are no exclusive elements in any approach to dynamic practice. Thesocial–personal dynamics of case and community work developed here have explored howone utilizes the predominant yet shifting emphases in each practice situation. A more sta-tic framework over time creates false dichotomies between various practice methodswithin the social work process. In practice terms, this either/or methodology unwittinglycreates the false belief that casework deals only with the interpersonal dynamics of theindividual or that organizing involves only socioeconomic and political concerns of a com-munity group. Likewise, the same impasse between managers from above and organizers


from below creates tensions between community-based practitioners that need not occur.A transformative framework, seeing both elements at play all the time, engages in a con-sistent examination of both social–personal factors simultaneously. This is why, as seen inthe earlier co-op example, an organizer must work on political strategy while seeking tounderstand personal needs and concerns of a group’s membership, allowing his or herunderstanding of dominant needs to determine tactical choices, at times concentrating onpersonal problems, at other times responding to political demands.

• Naturally, at any one moment in time, a particular element will predominate in thepractice situation, as any organizer or caseworker would recognize. But this framework nec-essarily poses that any social work intervention will have both individual and social issues thatinteract with each other and will emerge dynamically in that intervention at some point. Theorganizational tension needed for change is born out of the essence of this process, for itworks with the limitation and opportunity of each practice situation’s momentary emphasis.For example, at one point in time, an organizer’s emphasis is on mobilizing the group. Thisactive stance is born out of the group’s passivity. In a later, frenetic period of group growth,one’s role becomes more cautionary in order to stimulate maximally effective tactics.

• The macro practitioner’s role seeks to create this tension during the intervention ashealthy and necessary work. Yet this ability to dynamically adapt to such shifts can occuronly if the practitioner actively uses skills that can deal with the content of the immediatemoment and the process of the future. As seen in the example of the run on the bank, theintellectual (content-focused) and intuitive (process-focused) skills of great practice developout of this form of engagement as one seeks to deal with natural elements of each practicesituation—action and passivity, stasis and conflict, personal and social, and so on.

• As these contradictory elements are worked on together over time, one can onlyunderstand and act on the social process experientially, combining both theoretical andpractice content into it. As stated above, the false distinction between intuitive and intel-lectual skills is replaced here by a consistent use of both qualities. The practitioner learnsto use all of himself or herself (both mind and body) in each practice situation. The polit-ically “hard” organizer and emotionally “soft” caseworker abilities within us all allow atransformative practitioner to develop a socially charged practice firmly rooted in histor-ical circumstance, genuinely engaged with client/community.

• Furthermore, this framework drops the artificial distinction between short-termprocess goals (which are most often associated with individual, intrapersonal needs) andlong-term instrumental goals (most often associated with political demands), replacing thisdistinction with deeper awareness of the dynamics between long- and short-term change.This approach sees the emergence of a permanent process that shapes instrumental goals,which in turn alters later process developments. Freire (2000) calls this the constant devel-opment of consciousness.


• In short, the way in which we act is as important as the object of that action. Thusthe example of a caseworker willing to validate and use the social context as part of aclient’s program will be viewed as far more politically engaged than the top-down orga-nizer who ignores others’ personal development in pursuit of concrete political aims.Likewise, the organizer willing to grapple with her or his coworkers’ reactions in the midstof an intense campaign effort is far more personally engaged than the caseworker whoscreens out the social realities of a client’s life in order to highlight particular psychody-namic phenomena more clearly. In both cases, the practitioner is always able to find mean-ing in his or her work without opting for the falsely dichotomized clinical/political trackschosen by others who burned out elsewhere.

• Finally, this transformative framework consistently notes that practice is developedand shaped by larger social conditions and not just personal choices. This means in prac-tice terms that while values, ideas, and skills are necessary tools to practice, they neverstand outside of the influence of larger social forces and the political times in which onelives and works. (The year 2010 is very different from 1969!) In turn, of course, such val-ues and skills can and do affect the larger society over time. This is why an effective prac-titioner always remains cognizant of both personal and social factors within her or hiswork. This critically reflective skill does two things: It minimizes the effect of any staticassumption enveloping one’s practice; it discards the false notion that transformativechange can only occur within large-scale social movements.

Thus, the process of testing limitations and using the strengths of any social periodallows one to grow and develop within that period—including this one. Once understood,a transformative framework does away with both the false optimism associated with gut-level reactions to past social movements and today’s bouts of pessimism that one canimplement a change-oriented practice only if there are banners in the streets or elation thata new president can do it all. By actively developing the social–personal dynamics of apractice situation based on keen observation of what today’s world is like, a practitionerremains alive to and aware of as much change as is possible within that context. The two-sided coin of false idealism and postmodern cynicism is replaced with the less inflatedimage of realistic, humane, and engaged activism.

As stated in the introduction, this long (and difficult) chapter has attempted to delin-eate concretely what a transformational practice is and how it can be used by practition-ers at both the micro and macro levels. Its objectives were

• uniting the social and the personal regardless of method,• realizing the value of working with both the strengths and limitations of one’s

objective situation,• using both intuitive and intellectual skills,


• using one’s own tactical self-awareness and appreciation for one’s own strengthsand limitations to help develop a macro practitioner’s tactical flexibility and dimin-ished adherence to outmoded strategies.

All of these objectives are operational equivalents to some of the principlesinvolved in the transformational practice developed above. It is hoped that this formof practice may have something to offer, especially if we are to remain adept atresponding to the heightened needs of the 21st century—even as our immediateresource base will be much more constricted. In this critically reflective manner, wecan begin to end some of the imbalance and pessimism in presently dichotomizedforms of social work practice.

THE COMMUNITY TOOLBOX

The Community Toolbox has some excellent tools on how to analyze social problems andachieve clear, strategic goals at http://ctb.ku.edu/en/tablecontents/chapter_1017.htm.

Analyzing Community Problems and Solutions

Section 1. An Introduction to the Problem Solving Process

Section 2. Thinking Critically

Section 3. Defining and Analyzing the Problem

Section 4. Analyzing Root Causes of Problems: The “But Why?” Technique

Section 5. Addressing Social Determinants of Health and Development

Section 6. Generating and Choosing Solutions

Section 7. Putting Your Solution into Practice

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