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For those of us who work in community health and development, it's important to understand community -- what a community is, and the specific nature of the communities we work in. Anything we do in a community requires us to be familiar with its people, its issues, and its history. Carrying out an intervention or building a coalition are far more likely to be successful if they are informed by the culture of the community and an understanding of the relationships among individuals and groups within it. Taking the time and effort to understand your community well before embarking on a community effort will pay off in the long term. A good way to accomplish that is to create a community description -- a record of your exploration and findings. It's a good way to gain a comprehensive overview of the community -- what it is now, what it's been in the past, and what it could be in the future. In this section, we'll discuss how you might approach examining the community in some detail and setting down your findings in a community description. What is a community?While we traditionally think of a community as the people in a given geographical location, the word can really refer to any group sharing something in common. This may refer to smaller geographic areas -- a neighborhood, a housing project or development, a rural area -- or to a number of other possible communities within a larger, geographically-defined community.
These various communities often overlap. An African American art teacher, for example, might see herself (or be seen by others) as a member of the African American, arts, and/or education communities, as well as of a particular faith community. An Italian woman may become an intensely involved member of the ethnic and cultural community of her Nigerian husband. Whichever community defines your work, you will want to get to know it well. What do we mean by understanding and describing the community?Understanding the community entails understanding it in a number of ways. Whether or not the community is defined geographically, it still has a geographic context -- a setting that it exists in. Getting a clear sense of this setting may be key to a full understanding of it. At the same time, it's important to understand the specific community you're concerned with. You have to get to know its people -- their culture, their concerns, and relationships -- and to develop your own relationships with them as well.
We'll discuss all of these aspects of community in greater detail later in the section.
Once you've explored the relevant areas of the community, you'll have the information to create a community description. Depending on your needs and information, this description might be anything from a two-or three-page outline to an in-depth portrait of the community that extends to tens of pages and includes charts, graphs, photographs, and other elements. The point of doing it is to have a picture of the community at a particular point in time that you can use to provide a context for your community assessment and to see the results of whatever actions you take to bring about change.
Why make the effort to understand and describe your community?You may at this point be thinking, "Can't I work effectively within this community without gathering all this information?" Perhaps, if it's a community you're already familiar with, and really know it well. If you're new to the community, or an outsider, however, it's a different story. Not having the proper background information on your community may not seem like a big deal until you unintentionally find yourself on one side of a bitter divide, or get involved in an issue without knowing about its long and tangled history. Some advantages to taking the time to understand the community and create a community description include:
When should you make an effort to understand and describe the community?
While researching and writing a community description can take time, your work can almost always benefit from the information you gather. Whom should you contact to gather information?Much of your best and most interesting information may come from community members with no particular credentials except that they're part of the community. It's especially important to get the perspective of those who often don't have a voice in community decisions and politics -- low-income people, immigrants, and others who are often kept out of the community discussion. In addition, however, there are some specific people that it might be important to talk to. They're the individuals in key positions, or those who are trusted by a large part of the community or by a particular population. In a typical community, they might include:
How do you go about understanding and describing the community?General GuidelinesTo begin, let's look at some basic principles to keep in mind.
Gathering informationTo find out about various aspects of the community, you'll need a number of different methods of gathering information. We've already discussed some of them, and many of the remaining sections of this chapter deal with them, because they're the same methods you'll use in doing a full community assessment. Here, we'll simply list them, with short explanations and links to sections where you can get more information about each.
Understanding the CommunityNow let's consider what you might examine to understand and describe the community. You won't necessarily look for this information in the order given here, although it's a good idea to start with the first two. The community's physical characteristics. Get a map of the community and drive and/or walk around. (If the community isn't defined by geography, note and observe the areas where its members live, work, and gather.) Observe both the built and the natural environment. In the built environment, some things to pay attention to are:
In the category of natural features, we can include both areas that have been largely left to nature, and "natural" spaces created by human intervention.
Studying the physical layout of the community will serve you not only as information, but as a guide for finding your way around, knowing what people are talking about when they refer to various areas and neighborhoods, and gaining a sense of the living conditions of any populations you're concerned with. Community demographics. Demographics are the facts about the population that you can find from census data and other similar statistical information. Some things you might like to know, besides the number of people in the community:
In the U.S., most of this and other demographic information is available from the U.S. Census, from state and local government websites, or from other government agencies. Depending on what issues and countries you're concerned with, some sources of information might be the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, similar websites in other countries, and the various agencies of the United Nations. On many of these websites, notably the U.S. Census, various categories can be combined, so that you can, for example, find out the income levels in your community for African American women aged 25-34 with a high school education. If the website won't do it for you, it's fairly easy to trace the patterns yourself, thus giving you a much clearer picture of who community residents are and what their lives might be like. Another extremely useful resource is County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, which provides rankings for nearly every county in the nation. The County Health Rankings model includes four types of health factors: health behaviors, clinical care, social and economic, and the physical environment. The County Health Rankings illustrate what we know when it comes to what’s making people sick or healthy, and the new County Health Roadmaps show what we can do to create healthier places to live, learn, work and play. These reports can help community leaders see that our environment influences how healthy we are and how long we live, and even what parts of our environment are most influential. Community history. This can be a complex topic. The "standard" history -- when the community was founded and by whom, how long it has existed, how people lived there in the past, its major sources of work, etc. -- can often be found in the local library or newspaper archives, or even in books or articles written for a larger audience. The less comfortable parts of that history, especially recent history -- discrimination, conflict, economic and/or political domination by a small group -- are may not be included, and are more likely to be found by talking to activists, journalists, and others who are concerned with those issues. You might also gain information by reading between the lines of old newspaper articles and tracking down people who were part of past conflicts or events.
Community government and politics. There are a number of ways to learn about the structure and operation of local government:
As we all know, government isn't only about the rules and structures that hold it together. It's about people and their interactions...politics, in other words. The political climate, culture, and assumptions in a particular community often depend more on who elected and appointed officials are than on the limits or duties of their offices. The politics of many communities embody the ideal of government working for the public good. In other communities, politics takes a back seat to economics, and politicians listen largely to those with economic power -- the CEO's, owners, and directors of large businesses and institutions. In still others, the emphasis is on power itself, so that political decisions are made specifically to keep a particular party, group, or individual in control. Obviously, only in the first case is the public well served. In the other situations, fairness and equity tend to go out the window and decisions favor the powerful. Understanding the politics of the community -- who has power, who the power brokers are, who actually influences the setting of policy, how decisions are made and by whom, how much difference public opinion makes -- is fundamental to an understanding of the community as a whole. There's no formal way to get this information. Government officials may have very different interpretations of the political scene than activists or other community members. You'll have to talk to a variety of people, take a good look at recent political controversies and decisions (here's where newspaper archives can come in handy), and juggle some contradicting stories to get at the reality. Institutions. Community institutions, unless they are dysfunctional, can generally be viewed as assets. Finding them should be easy: as mentioned above, the Chamber of Commerce will probably have a list of them, the library will probably have one as well, the local newspaper will often list them, and they'll be in the phone book. They cover the spectrum of community life, including:
Groups and organizations. The groups and organizations that exist in the community, and their relative prestige and importance in community life, can convey valuable clues to the community's assumptions and attitudes. To some extent, you can find them in the same ways that you can find institutions, but the less formal ones you may be more likely to learn about through interviews and conversations. These groups can fall into a number of categories:
Economics/employment. Some of the information about economic issues can be found in public records, but some will come from interviews or conversations with business people, government officials, and activists, and some from observation. It's fairly easy to notice if one huge industrial plant dominates a community, for example, or if every third building appears to be a construction company. There are a number of questions you might ask yourself and others to help you understand the community's economic base and situation: What is the anchor of the community's tax base? Who are the major employers? Does the community have a particular business or business/industry category that underlies most of the jobs? Are there lots of locally-owned businesses and industries, or are most parts of larger corporations headquartered elsewhere? Are there corporate headquarters in the community? Is there a good deal of office space, and is it empty or occupied? Is there new development, and is the community attracting new business? What is the unemployment rate? Social structure. This may be the most difficult aspect of the community to understand, since it incorporates most of the others we've discussed, and is usually unspoken. People's answers to questions about it may ignore important points, either because they seem obvious to those who've lived with them for all or most of their lives, or because those things "just aren't talked about." Distrust or actual discrimination aimed at particular groups -- based on race, class, economics, or all three -- may be glossed over or never mentioned. The question of who wields the real power in the community is another that may rarely be answered, or at least not answered in the same way by a majority of community members. It's likely that it will take a number of conversations, some careful observation and some intuition as well to gain a real sense of the community's social structure. Describing the CommunityOnce you've gathered the information you need, the next step is describing the community. This is not really separate from understanding the community: in the process of organizing and writing down your information, you'll be able to see better how it fits together, and can gain greater understanding. There are many ways you can create a description of the community. The most obvious is simply to organize, record, and comment on your information by category: physical description, government, institutions, etc. You can comment about what has changed in the community over time, what has stayed the same, and where you think the community might be going. You might also include an analysis of how the various categories interact, and how that all comes together to form the community that exists. That will give you and anyone else interested a reasonably clear and objective description of the community, as well as a sense of how you see it. For a fuller picture, you could add photographs of some of the locations, people, conditions, or interactions you describe (perhaps as a Photovoice project), as well as charts or graphs of demographic or statistical information. For even more detail, you might compose a portrait in words of the community, using quotes from interviews and stories of community history to bring the description to life. Given the availability of technology, you don't have to limit yourself to any specific format. Computers allow you to easily combine various media -- photos, graphics, animation, text, and audio, for example. The description could add in or take the form of a video that includes a tour of the community, statements from and/or interviews with various community members (with their permission, of course), an audio voice-over, maps, etc. A video or a more text-based description -- or both -- could then be posted to a website where it would be available to anyone interested. Once you have a description put together, you might want to show it to some of the community members you talked to in the course of exploring the community. They can suggest other things you might include, correct errors of fact, and react to what they consider the accuracy or inaccuracy of your portrait and analysis of their community. With this feedback, you can then create a final version to use and to show to anyone interested. The point is to get as informative and accurate a picture of the community as possible that will serve as a basis for community assessment and any effort that grows out of it. The last word here is that this shouldn't be the last community description you'll ever do. Communities reinvent themselves constantly, as new buildings and developments are put up and old ones torn down, as businesses move in and out, as populations shift -- both within the community and as people and groups move in and out -- and as economic, social, and political conditions change. You have to keep up with those changes, and that means updating your community description regularly. As with most of the rest of the community building work described in the Community Tool Box, the work of understanding and describing the community is ongoing, for as long as you remain committed to the community itself. In SummaryUnderstanding a community is crucial to being able to work in it. Failing to understand it will deny you credibility and make it difficult for you both to connect with community members and to negotiate the twists and turns of starting and implementing a community initiative or intervention. An extremely important part of any community assessment, therefore, is to start by finding out as much about the community as you can -- its physical and geographical characteristics, its culture, its government, and its assumptions. By combing through existing data, observing, and learning from community members, you can gain an overview of the community that will serve you well. Recording your findings and your analysis of them in a community description that you can refer to and update as needed will keep your understanding fresh and help others in your organization or with whom you collaborate. |