OBJECTIVES By the end of this session you will be able to:
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Tasks for this session
Before you come to class for our fourth class meeting, please do the following:
Read
Read pages 70-121 in the textbook Building Powerful Community Organizations by Michael Jacoby Brown (2006) 2h 40 minutes
Read this article from the August 21, 2017 New Yorker “Is There Any Point to Protesting?” by Nathan Heller. If you have time, you could also read the January 27, 2017 article “How Protests Become Successful Social Movements” from the Harvard Business Review.
Read the cover feature article from the September 7th 2017 Illinois Times: “The New Activists”. If you have time, you could also read “What makes a protest effective” (broadcast on The World back on October 21, 2019). See also the article by Shom Mazumder from FiveThirtyEight (from June 8, 2020) “What Protests Can (And Can’t) Do” or “What Makes a Successful Protest?” published on December 15, 2020 in Chatham House.
Read the brief articles about Character Strengths and read the brief descriptions of the character strengths.
If you want a more scholarly article about character strengths, just do a literature search and you will find many good research articles that use the Values in Action Character Strengths survey. For example:
Toner, E., Haslam, N., Robinson, J., & Williams, P. (2012). Character strengths and wellbeing in adolescence: Structure and correlates of the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Children. Personality And Individual Differences, 52(5), 637-642. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.12.014
You might even look for some possible criticisms of the Character Strengths inventory, in articles like this one:
Banicki, K. (2014). Positive psychology on character strengths and virtues. A disquieting suggestion. New Ideas In Psychology, 33, 21-34. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2013.12.001
Total reading time: 3-4 hours
Watch
If you didn't see it last week, you had better watch it this week: you need to watch the documentary about Whitney Young. You can go to library.uis.edu and search for The Powerbroker: Whitney Young's Fight for Civil Rights. It is available. You can click on the "view now" button, and get access to the film (use your NetID and Password to get access from home on your computer). The movie starts at 1:30 out of the 56:37 time of the feed, so you can scrub ahead past the first minute or ninety seconds to avoid the screen test.
Tasks
Activity One
Do your Character Strengths Inventory. Get the list of your strengths. You will need to register, but there is no fee associated with this.
Activity Two
Next week (session 4) there will be a few questions about assertive responses in a hypothetical situation (described in this session below). You may want to study the situation this week to prepare for that.
Activity Three
You probably ought to work on your experiential learning assignments. Perhaps draft an e-mail to send to your powerful contacts for the second experiential learning assignment (about 1 hour)
Activity Four
You probably ought to join a group to get started in your group involvement experiential learning assignment. (about 1 hour)
Session Time Budget
3h 30m |
Class meeting on Zoom and Canvas Discussion Boards |
2h |
Reading Brown, pp. 70-121 |
2h |
Read the articles “Is There Any Point to Protesting?” by Nathan Heller and “The New Activists”. Possibly also read “How Protests Become Successful Social Movements” and/or “What makes a protest effective” and/or “What Protests Can (And Can’t) Do” and/or “What Makes a Successful Protest?”. I know you can read the first two articles in less than two hour, so fill out the rest of your time for the two hours reading the additional four articles, reading as much as you can in the two hours. |
1h |
Assignment related to 3rd experiential learning, join the group |
1h |
Assignment related to 2nd experiential learning, draft e-mails or scripts for phone calls with influentials |
1h 30m |
Read a bit about the character strengths and positive psychology, and then take the character strengths test to learn what your own character strengths may be. |
Session Lecture About Assignments
Continue working on your experiential learning assignments. In addition to the assignment to host or organize an event in which you invite at least a few persons you don't know well (which I discussed a bit in the last session’s web page), you should also keep in mind the other assignment you should be working on in the coming weeks:
Look over your Facebook contacts (or LINE, Hangouts, or WeChat, Snapchat, Instagram, whatever), and also consider your childhood friends, people you grew up with, classmates, people who attend religious services with you, people in your workplace, and so forth, and determine:
1) the most potentially powerful and influential people you directly know, and
2) the most potentially powerful and influential people you know slightly or who are well-known to people whom you know well.
Power and influence usually come from one of three sources: 1) wealth; 2) positions of respect and authority (elected officials, professionals in positions of leadership, etc.); and 3) reputation (known for being active and getting things done, social connectedness in a community).
Find the top three most influential people you directly know and the top three people you are one contact away from. For the three you know directly, ask them about three things.
First, ask if they have ever used their wealth, their talent, their expertise, or their influence to try to make a difference in the world. Did they support a particular cause, serve on a board, launch a campaign, or get involved in politics, or lobby, for something they believed in? If they are in politics already, you might ask about how they first got involved in elections and elected office, or you might ask them about their top goal for their political agenda or career.
Second, ask them if they might ever help you if you were involved in a cause they believed in. If you had a good idea for something and were trying to get something wonderful done to improve a community or policy or help out some people, would your influential/wealthy/powerful friend be interested in supporting you in some way?
Third, ask them about what sort of appeals for help are most likely to get their support. That is, what sort of approaches or methods or situations would be most likely to elicit their support (could be service on a board, financial contributions, volunteering expertise, exerting their influence through social networks, trying to influence others to join in some cause… the idea of “support” should be considered broadly). You should also be intersted in how they choose what to support. If their friends are involved, does that help? Do they want a personal connection with the issue? Do they want to see evidence that people are are working for improvement are effective in reaching their goals?
The purpose of this assignment is to help you become more comfortable with the idea that when it comes to power, wealth, and influence, we are not all equal; and, as a consequence, you may need to figure out who has resources and power, and seek out their help sometimes. Networking and using contacts may be an important part of macro practice, and to get comfortable with this, you need experience in considering your own networks of friends and acquaintances and using those networks to find allies who can mentor you or support you in your efforts. As you do this assignment, consider your own comfort with approach others for help and advice.
When you write about this, be sure to discuss the three most influential persons who are one contact away from you, even though you are not tasked with approaching those persons. Write about how you determined which of the persons you know have the most power and influence. Write about how you felt as you approached them and raised the three questions, and of course write about their responses. Reflect on what you have learned.
This experience should be completed by the end of the sixth week of the semester (ideally). You should have written about it in your learning notebook by the start of the ninth week of the semester (I hope).
Also keep in mind that you will eventually need to submit your work on the experiential learning assignments as well as your collections of articles and your reactions to the articles through your learning journal (you turn it in for the first time in the seventh or eighth session so I can get feedback to you on the ninth or tenth session). Hopefully by now you have found an article or two about macro practice or activism or some sort of campaign to change laws or policies or improve communities or organizations. As you find such articles, bring them to class and mention them in the opening 30 minutes when we have open discussion. You might find interesting sources related to macro practice at this page about sources, or this other page about community organizing sources and news.
One more activity you should do in this session is to take the VIA-Character Strengths inventory. You can paste the results into your macro practice journal. You will first need to register to take this (it is free). I recommend you use a private e-mail address to register, so that if you take this again in future years, you will not need to remember your UIS e-mail address or password.
For your information, my rank-ordered character strengths as most recently measured are: 1) Forgiveness; 2) Kindness; 3) Love of Learning; 4) Fairness; 5) Spirituality; 6) Curiosity; 7) Judgment; 8) Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence; 9) Bravery; and 10) Creativity. I've taken the survey a few times, and the top ten in my last time taking it contained all the character strengths that have ever been in my top five, but they do move around a little from year to year.
I have pursued a career in academics, so this fits with my strengths of love-of-learning and curiosity. I think my kindness and fairness help me as an educator. Kindness is also probably a common top-ten character strengths among most social workers or persons in fields related to social work.
I think the character strengths inventory will take you about an hour to complete and then review, if we also include the time it takes to read about it.
That leaves you with a few hours to work on your experiential learning projects.
Prepare for exercise you will do next week:
Throughout the semester we’ll be practicing some macro practice skills by looking at realistic problems suffered in real world situations. Here is a brief description of the rural agency (a Head Start division in a rural community service agency), and an issue you might imagine facing if you were at this agency:
Agency 1, (CAP):
The Community Alliance for Progress (CAP), although it sounds like a chamber of commerce, is actually a human services and social services agency working across a seven county area of a rural part of a Midwestern state. Within CAP one large agency division is in charge of Head Start. The Head Start services are in turn divided into two programs, one for pregnant mothers and children up to age three, and another more traditional Head Start program that serves children aged 3-5 (until children are ready to start kindergarten). About 320 children from 280 families are in the traditional head start program, while another 60 children or pregnant mothers (from an additional 40 households) participate in the Early Head Start. There are about 30 additional private and public for-profit and non-profit agencies serving children and families in the seven-county region, ranging from youth groups (Scouting, mentoring programs, 4-H, FFA), to residential treatment centers for troubled adolescents and home day care for children and youth with moderate to profound intellectual disabilities.
The staff in the Head Start program also are divided into two types of service-delivery formats. Some are home visitors who go out to the homes of families participating in Head Start and drive around the county to do recruiting, assessment, and general macro-practice organizing with the other services, churches, family courts, and the state’s child protective services. Other staff take care of specific sites (Head Start Centers) where children come to participate, working very much like traditional pre-schools. This section of the Head Start division includes a transportation service with a fleet of a few very old school busses and vans that are used to pick up children.
The problems encountered by the staff in Head Start are typical of any rural Midwestern area. Some client families are headed by single parents who have poor relationship skills, the lowest educational backgrounds, and various mental health or physical health issues that make it difficult for them to form long-term supportive relationships with other adults or give their children what middle-class Americans might consider “adequate” parenting care. Other clients are from families that have the skills and emotional or mental abilities they will need to climb out of poverty, but are just at a life stage where they need help (typically women fleeing abusive boyfriends/husbands who won’t help much in caring for their children, teen-agers who decided not to have an abortion or get married when they became pregnant at a young age, women who have been abandoned by a husband/boyfriend/partner or whose partner/boyfriend/husband has lost her/his job). There are clients in families where each sibling has a different father. There are many children in foster care. Some children’s biological parents are in jail. Many children have a parent who is suffering from crystal-meth or/and opioid addiction. This is a very rural area, so many households live miles from social support, and have difficulty affording to legally maintain a source of transport (if you live in a rural area and you can’t afford insurance, or have your license suspected, or your car breaks down and you can’t afford repairs, well then, what do you do?)
So, isolation, crime and incarceration, domestic violence and child maltreatment, and substance addictions are frequent issues. The economic conditions in this area of the state are poor (much worse in this rural area than in other parts of the state as the economy shifts away from small towns and family farms to favor corporate agriculture and big box stores and Wall-Marts concentrated in small cities).
The Head Start and Early Head Start divisions work fairly independently of the larger CAP structure. There are a variety of good reasons for this. The other divisions of CAP (e.g., community organizing, services to elderly, care for persons with intellectual disabilities, diversion programs to keep young offenders out of jail, substance abuse treatment, and food pantries) are physically located several miles away from any of the head start centers or the main Head Start office. There are also bad reasons for HS and EHS being so independent of CAP (e.g., the director of CAP is horrible around women, and the female staff of HS and EHS are wary of him and keep as far away as possible).
However, you must meet with the CAP director. You need to get funding to replace one of the school busses used by Head Start. The bus is not safe to use any more, due to various problems with it, and a physical repair of the bus to make it safe again would cost as much as the purchase of a replacement bus. You know that a replacement bus and various other improvements or maintenance of the surviving existing buses should cost about $40,000, which is more than double your usual budget for your Head Start busses and van.
You have considered grants to pay for transportation or a replacement bus, but after about six hours of research on that problem you and your contacts have found nothing. You’ve consulted with local churches where you have contacts, and nothing has turned up. You’ve done some research on the cost of a used replacement bus and that is how you have come up with the figure of $40,000. You’ve also considered what will happen to your Head Start if you lose the unsafe bus and fail to get a replacement. You do not have the staff or vehicles that could make up for the loss of the bus unless you were willing to pick up some children as early as 6:45 a.m. and make them endure a 1-hour commute to and from the Head Start center.
You have determined that if the CAP director does not agree to give more funds to Head Start to fund the bus, you will need to get this issue on the next CAP Board of Directors meeting.
Since you know the Director of CAP can be rude, sexist, and uncooperative, you need to prepare assertive responses to the sort of things he might say before you meet with him. Your assignment: in class, work with one or two other students to come up with responses to the following things he might say. At home, write up the responses and add a comment explaining how your responses are assertive and likely to be helpful to your cause. This will be a few discussion questions in session four.
- He says, “you’re coming to me with a request for more money for a new bus? $40,000? That’s just not going to happen. There is no way. You’ll need to find some other way to solve your problem.”
- [you have made a suggestion that you would like to look at the agency budget or have someone look at it to see whether there might be a way to compromise, (as you can get the budget from the staff in the accounting department you don’t need to ask for this, but you’re giving the director a chance to agree with you and work with you on solving the problem)]. The director responds, “No, I don’t want you to do. You people don’t understand the funding situation or the intricacies of running this agency, and you’ll make some crazy suggestion about cutting some vital program from another division, and that will cause internal problems with the agency, and you wouldn’t find anything to cut or transfer to your transportation budget anyway. We’re not negotiating the whole agency budget here, we’re just looking at your old bus.”
- The director says, “Look, why don’t we talk about this over dinner? I’ll treat you. There is a good seafood restaurant and I’d love to take you out and we can negotiate there tonight. How about tomorrow night? Maybe afterwards we can work out the details over a drink? It would be friendlier that way.” He is transparently trying to put on some romantic charm.
- The director says, “I’ll see what I can do, but no promises,” and doesn’t seem very interested. You have the distinct impression that the director doesn’t care about the transportation situation you’re facing in Head Start, and you have no faith that he will follow through.
- [The director has been uncooperative, and you suggest that the board of directors could help, and you want to have the president of the board give you a spot on the next Board of Director’s agenda.] The director responds defensively, “No, that won’t be necessary. The Board is very busy, and they don’t want to hear about old busses or details like that. Let me handle this. I can talk to the board. I’m normally the one who sets the agenda for board meetings anyway, and I know the board already has a full agenda for the next couple meetings.”
- The director attacks, “This request for an increase to pay for a new bus was not handled properly. These sorts of expensive single-item purchases need to be handled well in advance, and you’ve waited until the last moment, and this puts me in a bad situation, and makes me look bad. I’d swear you did this intentionally to put me in a difficult spot. Now I can’t fund the bus, and you’ll make me out to be the bad guy, but really this is your fault for bringing this to our attention and requesting that half of the money be set aside last year.” [His response is unfair. You have mentioned in written annual reports that the replacement of the bus would soon be a necessary expense. You could not anticipate that the bus would fail this year rather than failing after another few years of service. Also, you cannot be blamed for the sudden failure of the bus and the urgency of the need. It is in fact the director’s responsibility to prepare for such expenses, and for years in annual reports you have given him written warning about the aging fleet of busses and vans in the Head Start division.]
Your assertive rights:
- You have the right to express our ideas and opinions openly and honestly.
- You have the right to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes.
- You have the right to direct and govern your own life. In other words, you have the right to be responsible for yourself.
- You have the right to stand up for yourself without unwarranted anxiety and make choices that are good for you.
- You have the right not to be liked by everyone. (Do you like everyone you know?)
- You have the right, on the one hand, to make requests and, on the other, to refuse them without feeling guilty.
- You have the right to ask for information if you need it.
- You have the right to decide not to exercise your assertive rights.
Discussion Board Questions (Activity One)
Go into Canvas, log in, and respond to the discussion questions for this session.
These are:
DQ 3-1: Check In
Let us know how you are doing, and what is going on in your life.
DQ 3-2: Collection of Images
In Session two you had an assignment to:
Spend about 45 minute to an hour gathering images associated with political practice or community organizing. The easiest thing to do will be to find images associated with social movements. You may collect memes from social media to include in this project. After you have gathered a collection of such images (at least three; but no more than a dozen, I think, would be a good collection), I want you to study the images and answer the following questions for yourself:
1) Is this an attractive image or an image that is unattractive and exerts an influence through its unattractiveness, or is this an image where the aesthetics of the image are unimportant?
2) What is the response in a viewer that is intended?
3) What is the image telling us that isn't in the script? Or, if it a text-heavy image, what is the message that isn't literally in the script, but is implied by the text? At any rate, decode the messages in the image. What does it mean? What does it try to influence us to do or think?
4) Evaluate the effectiveness of the image. Is it likely to affect someone in ways that would satisfy the designers/artist?
So, this Discussion Question 3-2 is where you share your collection of images and explain them.
DQ 3-3: Your Character Strengths.
Share with us your top character strengths. What is your reaction to the character strengths identified as being your top ones? Does this seem accurate? Given what you have read about the character strengths, how do you think you could use your character strengths in your life and career?
DQ 3-4: Protests
Imagine someone is trying to organize a protest, and since you are a social worker with a BSW, they ask you if you know something about how to organize the protest and how to make the protest “work”. What would you recommend, and what sort of things would you encourage?
What do you think makes for successful protests? What makes protests fail?
DQ 3-5: Building an Organization
From pages 70 to page 121 in Brown’s book about building community organizations, identify the three most important ideas or insights offered in those pages. What are the critical points that would help you do macro practice? Just paraphrase or summarize the three most important ideas you took from the reading.
DQ 3-6: What progress are you making?
Report to the class about your progress in your learning journal, your experiential assignments, and share any articles you have found about macro practice, administrative practice, or political practice.
DQ 3-7: The base of the tri-level model of violence
Insitutional violence is defined as policies and bureaucratic functionalism that obstruct the spontaneous unfolding of human potential or, to use the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 26), we might say institutional violence is when society's institutions block "the full development of the human personality" and degrade respect for human rights. Structural-cultural violence includes conventional values and everyday collective habits of thought and feeling that lead to passive acceptance of inequalities and deprivations.
A couple points to respond to here: first, where there is scarcity, some people will be deprived of some things, and also, complete inequality is undesireable, as some modicum of inequality seems to be necessary (given human nature in its present form) to create systems of incentives and sanctions that promote desireable activity and discourage harmful activity. So, it cannot really be “violence” that accepts some degree of inequality and deprivation, can it? What level of inequality and deprivaiton, or what types of inequality and deprivation might be actual results of social-cultural violence that accepts a “violent” status quo? Also, is it ever sometimes necessary or desireable to block some forms of the “unfolding of human potential” or “development of the human personality” for the benefit of the blocked individuals or society in general?
What I am getting at here is that, while the terms “institutional violence” and “structural-cultural violence” seem to have useful applications and they enhance our understanding of violence, do you think our understanding of these terms needs some qualifications or nuance? How would you explain the uses of the tri-level model of violence to someone who was skeptical of the ideas of “institutional violence” and “structural cultural violence” and said that those things are not really aptly described as “violence” and should instead by described as “injustice” or even “the harmful aspects of conservatism and traditionalism” with an understanding that almost all things have beneficial and harmful aspects?
Interesting Stuff To Explore
Some of these sources may be helpful to you:
You may be looking for sources for articles about macro practice. Here are some sources you could try:
General Organizing
- For labor organizing, you can see what the AFL-CIO is saying and promoting. If you are interested, you can sign up for updates from the AFL-CIO Working America.
- Race Forward can help with racial justice issues through research, advocacy, and journalism.
- The Center for Community Change tries to support leaders in grassroots community organizations in low-income or minority communities.
- If you're interested in economic growth and methods of organizing centered on helping the manufacturing sector of a local economy you might find help from the Center for Labor and Community Research.
- The Kresge Foundation makes donations to community organizing efforts.
- If you want to know who is donating what amounts of money to which political campaigns, you can find out by looking up public information about campaign contributions made available at the Open Secrets website from the Center for Responsive Politics.
- Citizens for Tax Justice is an organization that says it is dedicated to fair taxation.
- Families USA is a voice for health care consumers.
- The Midwest Academy offers training for community organizers.
- Boardsource is a group that tries to help non-profit corporations improve their advisory boards.
- The National Organizers Alliance is a sort of professional organization for community organizers.
- If you're interested in housing issues, you should be familiar with the National Housing Institute.
- If you're concerned about wealth and income inequalities, you should be paying attention to UFE (United for a Fair Economy).
- Gamaliel is a group dedicated to helping train community organizers and pastors who want to improve their communities.
Remember about the next class.
We are also scheduled to do more micro courses with the USIP (Negotiation in session four and Nonviolent Action in session five). You need to do two additional courses with USIP on your own (pick any you like; although I assume you will want to take the micro courses). You can do those later in the first half of the semester, or get them over with now if you like.