Community Power and Empowerment
Community Power and Empowerment

Author: Brian D. Christens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-16

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0190671769

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Many people want to help bring about changes in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and communities. Leaders and scholars of change efforts are likewise eager for insights into what makes some organizations and coalitions capable of building and exercising power. Why are some groups successful in making changes in policies and systems and in sustaining their momentum over time, while others struggle or never really get off the ground? With Community Power and Empowerment, Brian D. Christens brings the most comprehensive analysis of empowerment theory yet conducted to bear on these questions, taking aim at many of the longstanding weaknesses and ambiguities of empowerment theory, research, and practice. For example, one major hindrance is that most notions of empowerment have not been coherently connected with community power. In addition, research has emphasized psychological aspects of empowerment over organizational processes, and has neglected community empowerment processes to an even greater extent. By linking empowerment and community power, Christens constructs a holistic framework for assessing and comparing community-driven change efforts. This book offers new guidance for inquiries into outcomes and impacts of empowerment processes on health and well-being, providing a resource for researchers, organizational leaders, practitioners, and anyone interested in collective action for change.

Community Power Structure
Community Power Structure

Author: Floyd Hunter

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1469616947

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In this study of busy, complex Regional City -- and it is a real city -- the author has analyzed the power structure from top to bottom. He has searched out the men of power and, under fictitious names, has described them as they initiate policies in their offices, their homes, their clubs. They form a small, stable group at the top of the social structure. Their decision-making activities are not known to the public, but they are responsible for whatever is done, or not done, in their community. Beneath this top policy group is a clearly marked social stratification, through which decisions sift down to the substructures chosen to put them into effect. The dynamic relations within the power structure are made clear in charts, but the real interest lies in the author's report of what people themselves say. The African American community is also studied, with its own power structure and its own complicated relations with the large community. The method of study is fully described in an Appendix. The book should be of particular value to sociologists, political scientists, city-planning executives, Community Council members, social workers, teachers, and research workers in related fields. As a vigorous and readable presentation of facts, it should appeal to the reader who would like to know how his/her own community is run. Community Power Structure is not an expose. It is a description and discussion of a social phenomenon as it occured. It is based on sound field research, including personal observation and interviews by the author.

The Power of Community-Engaged Teacher Preparation
The Power of Community-Engaged Teacher Preparation

Author: Patricia Clark

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0807779504

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Discover how and why community-engaged teacher preparation is a powerful and vital approach to address an educational system that is historically deficient, discriminatory, and decidedly inequitable. In this edited volume, the authors argue that past practice is inadequate and issue a mandate for a new approach to educator preparation. Articulating a clear definition of community-engaged teacher preparation, they focus on national and international initiatives that have been sustained over time and are having a direct impact on student learning. Chapters are written by school, university, and community partners who speak to the innovation, creativity, commitment, and persistence required to reinvent teacher preparation. They also underscore the complexity of this work, the humility necessary to reflect and reconsider, and the true spirit of authentic solidarity among university, school, and community partners required to seek and secure equity for children in schools. Book Features: Provides a critical examination of structural inequity in education and ways to address it through community-engaged teacher preparation. Describes a teacher preparation model that is enacted in solidarity with members of historically marginalized populations.Offers clear guidance on what is meant by culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogies with examples of how these frameworks are being operationalized.Explores the obstacles and opportunities involved in the implementation process. “A collection of powerful authors who offer theoretical considerations, evidence-based approaches, and practical considerations for not just teacher education as usual but community-engaged teacher education.” —From the Foreword by Tyrone C. Howard, University of California, Los Angeles

The Power of Community (PB)
The Power of Community (PB)

Author: Howard Partridge

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2018-01-26

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1260117170

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Boost engagement—and profits—by feeding your staff’s craving for communityIt seems the more connected we are through email, smart phones, and social media, the more disconnected we become on a personal, human level—and teamwork suffers tremendously. If this is happening in your company, fear not. The solution is here. The Power of Community provides a step-by-step approach to transforming your organization by tapping into the human need to connect with and feel valued by others. By creating a company culture based on core community values, you’ll empower your workforce, build customer loyalty, and drive profits and growth. This game-changing guide describes why “community” is the answer to employee disengagement—which is now at a record 70 percent—and it explains how to develop the kind of culture that makes an industry leader of your business. It takes hard work and determination, but the rewards will astound you.“When people feel like they belong to one another, when they feel cared for, and they believe that the vision is worth sacrificing for, they will go the extra mile for the company,” the author writes. This is true community, and it’s at the core of today’s most successful companies.Business leaders often tell their people, “We’re all in this together,” but very few follow through on this sentiment. Separate yourself from the pack by implementing the simple but profoundly effective methods in this book. When people feel they’re part of something bigger than themselves, they’re more collaborative, creative, and innovative—and this will always drive organizational success. Everyone wins in The Power of Community

Revolutionary Power
Revolutionary Power

Author: Shalanda Baker

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1642830674

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In September 2017, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, completely upending the energy grid of the small island. The nearly year-long power outage that followed vividly shows how the new climate reality intersects with race and access to energy. The island is home to brown and black US citizens who lack the political power of those living in the continental US. As the world continues to warm and storms like Maria become more commonplace, it is critical that we rethink our current energy system to enable reliable, locally produced, and locally controlled energy without replicating the current structures of power and control. In Revolutionary Power, Shalanda Baker arms those made most vulnerable by our current energy system with the tools they need to remake the system in the service of their humanity. She argues that people of color, poor people, and indigenous people must engage in the creation of the new energy system in order to upend the unequal power dynamics of the current system. Revolutionary Power is a playbook for the energy transformation complete with a step-by-step analysis of the key energy policy areas that are ripe for intervention. Baker tells the stories of those who have been left behind in our current system and those who are working to be architects of a more just system. She draws from her experience as an energy-justice advocate, a lawyer, and a queer woman of color to inspire activists working to build our new energy system. Climate change will force us to rethink the way we generate and distribute energy and regulate the system. But how much are we willing to change the system? This unique moment in history provides an unprecedented opening for a deeper transformation of the energy system, and thus, an opportunity to transform society. Revolutionary Power shows us how.

Power from the People
Power from the People

Author: Greg Pahl

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2012-08-13

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1603584102

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Over 90 percent of US power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It is delivered through long, brittle transmission lines, and then is squandered through inefficiency and waste. But it doesn't have to be that way. Communities can indeed produce their own local, renewable energy. Power from the People explores how homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, governments, and businesses are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures. Using examples from around the nation - and occasionally from around the world - Greg Pahl explains how to plan, organize, finance, and launch community-scale energy projects that harvest energy from sun, wind, water, and earth. He also explains why community power is a necessary step on the path to energy security and community resilience - particularly as we face peak oil, cope with climate change, and address the need to transition to a more sustainable future. This book - the second in the Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Post Carbon Institute's Community Resilience Series - also profiles numerous communitywide initiatives that can be replicated elsewhere.

Community Power and Grassroots Democracy
Community Power and Grassroots Democracy

Author: Michael Kaufman

Publisher: International Development Research Centre Books

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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The collected essays in this book provide a comparative examination of the process of grassroots mobilization and the development of community-based forms of popular democracy in Central and South America. The first part contains studies from individual countries on organizations ranging from those supported by governments and integrated into the country's political structure to groups that were organized against the existing political system. The organizations studied included those focusing on a particular concern, such as housing, and those with wide responsibility for community affairs; but all were organizations based on common interests where people lived and, in some cases, where people worked. The second part offers theme studies on men, women and differential participation; problems and meanings associated with decentralization, especially in relation to devolution of power to the local level and the construction of popular alternatives; and the competing theoretical paradigms of new social movements and resource mobilization.

Who Really Rules?
Who Really Rules?

Author: G. William Domhoff

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780878552283

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Robert A. Dahl's Who Governs? is a classic pluralist study which has had an important influence on American social science since the early sixties. Who Really Rules? provides a categorical challenge--empirical, methodological, and theoretical--to Dahl's work. Empirically, Domhoff's restudy of New Haven shows through newly discovered documents that Dahl was wrong about the pluralism of New Haven's power structure. He also presents the most systematic statement of power structure methodology yet made, a statement that contradicts Dahl's methodological claims which have been the prevailing wisdom in American social science for over fifteen years. Finally, Domhoff outlines the national policy planning network through which the big business ruling class dominates urban government. Who Really Rules? is unique in that it makes possible for the first time a dialogue between pluralist and ruling-class views on the basis of studies of the same city by leading exponents of the rival theoretical positions. It is original in that it includes much data not revealed by Dahl. It presents the methodology of power structure research in the most comprehensive fashion yet attempted, and reveals a ruling-class network for urban policy planning that has never before been fully articulated.

Neighbor Power
Neighbor Power

Author: Jim Diers

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780295984445

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Providing concrete examples for citizens and government officials, Diers describes a successful program to support community self-help projects and a community-driven planning process that involved 30,000 people.