As I was considering Gary’s Rice’s call for a Think Tank, Kate McCarthy's Welcome Wagon, Stephen Calhoun’s Folk Anthropology, and Sean Wheeler’s concern for the racial divide, I came upon a relevant article in The American Prospect – “Can Block Clubs Block Despair?†by Eyal Press.
The article features something called “Collective Efficacy†- “a theory that emphasizes the capacity of residents to overcome obstacles on the basis of shared expectations -- specifically, that they can work together for the common good.â€Â
I believe much of the LO practice and the Visionary Alignment, with the emphasis on real name statement, trust and social cohesion, could be considered as efforts to raise “Collective Efficacy†levels in Lakewood.
We have only begun.
Perhaps we can consider research in Collective Efficacy and devise strategies that advance a sense of common skin in the Lakewood game, and a moral order of respectful interaction and reverance for the places we inhabit. This might begin a humane and sensible bridge to the racial divide that Sean featured in another thread.
There are good things happening in Plover Patch, the Birdtown Community Garden, which speaks precisely to collective efficacy. Sean’s Walk Across Lakewood is another strand. Walking and talking on the streets and in the parks. Growing a sense of subsistence together from the Lakewood earth - the LEAF Community.
As Press suggests, collective efficacy might provide a common middle ground for working though behavioral and structural perspectives that surfaced early in the race thread.
Here’s Press:
“…..Trees had been planted along the divider, and some of the dwellings sported their own gardens. At the entrance to the street was a sign: "Help Us Keep It Clean." It had been placed there by a block club, a grass-roots organization formed to encourage neighbors to meet and discuss their shared concerns. No major crimes had taken place on this street in recent memory, a fact St. Jean attributed to the higher level of trust and cohesion among its residents.
Can such a seemingly mundane factor explain why one block in a neighborhood is safer than another? For several decades, the debate over the myriad problems of America's inner cities has been dominated by two schools of thought: on one side, liberals who have emphasized the structural factors (racism, poverty) at their root; on the other, conservatives who've stressed the behavioral pathologies (out-of-wedlock birth, criminality) they believe are to blame. Yet over the past decade, a new theory has emerged to explain why some areas fare better than others even when their residents face similarly daunting odds. It stresses neither jobs nor personal behavior but something at once more elementary and more difficult to capture: the nature of the social interactions taking place among neighbors, and the degree to which they foster a shared capacity to solve problems and enforce collective norms.
These qualities appear to have a powerful effect on everything from the level of violence in a community to the conduct of adolescent youth to the likelihood that a neighborhood will remain poor, which is perhaps why a growing number of scholars and policy-makers are interested in teasing out what exactly fosters such traits.
The first indication of this dynamic came nearly a decade ago, in August 1997, when the journal Science published a seven-page article titled "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy." It reported some findings from one of the largest social-science research experiments ever launched in the United States……â€Â
Another critical point to consider is the psycho-sexual development of young people – how lust screws into identity. Who is providing guidance here?
“…….Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, co-director of the Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia University, described the study's impact to me as "huge." Brooks-Gunn is a psychologist who studies childhood development. She has published papers showing that collective efficacy can play a role in delaying the age of sexual initiation among youth, particularly among adolescent girls.â€Â
For more:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?art ... ck_despair
Kenneth Warren
) documenting some of the problems that we face. Now what do you say we come forward with a few citizen-initiated solution suggestions?