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More Thoughts: On the Spirit of Community Psychology

2010; Wiley; Volume: 45; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10464-010-9305-1

1573-2770

James G. Kelly,

Health Policy Implementation Science

“When I’m working with students, I ask them: putting a ‘great voice’ at the bottom of the list, what do you think makes a great singer?” It’s obvious with her, and with Aretha, that “it’s your spirit” (Reeves 2008, p. 125). I believe there is value in thinking about how to create emotional and intellectual resources to anchor, enhance and evolve our spirit when doing the work of community psychology. Back in 2001, I offered some ideas about creating settings in our own work places to stimulate a collective spirit (Kelly 2002). In a later brief autobiographical statement I presented some examples of people, places, situations and coincidences that helped my personal spirit and élan during some stressful and fortunately some more happy times (Kelly 2006). In the 2002 publication, I focused on three topics: the history of community psychology, sharing stories about our work, as well as creating settings to celebrate our spirit. In the 2006 publication, I gave examples of research topics of my own that were influenced by people, places and coincidences that in turn influenced what I studied and how I carried out the work. On this occasion, I will Illustrate how five persons, as examples, influenced my values and aspirations to continue the expeditions in our field. These five persons contributed to my intellectual spirit AND my views on four research agendas. If we all can benefit from such resources we can enhance our collective spirit. The very activity of reflecting on how past personal life experiences influence career interests has been an energizing experience. I hope it can be for you. By spirit, I mean our passion, our zeal, our emotional energy to engage with our field, and as my mother might have said, our “pluck”. When beginning our careers, our families, social networks, mentors and senior colleagues are sources of strength, support and feedback that are fundamental for us to keep our spirit. When we begin our newly created professional roles, to make our way, it is largely up to us to create our own support systems to sustain our spirit. Our family and social networks, colleagues and students may be at our side, but it is ourselves who are challenged to personally cope. My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or others…people have to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves (Payne 1989, p. 893). Her assertion has given me resolve to create resources for myself. It has been the creation of personal, organizational and community resources in varied settings that have enabled me to create a career in community psychology. Recently I have had the opportunity with co-editor Anna V. Song to publish the narratives of eleven community psychologists (Kelly and Song 2004, 2008). Their stories are inspiring. They are: Julian Rappaport, Ed Trickett, Dick Reppucci, Beth Shinn, Jean Ann Linney and Rhona Weinstein in university settings and Irma Serrano Garcia, Carolyn Swift, Ann Mulvey, John Morgan and Tom Wolff from more applied settings. Reading them may be inspirational for you as well. I mention them because I believe learning about those who enhance the spirit of others can help us with our own identification with community psychology. There is a valid role for narrative, biography and autobiography in our field. My take on the value of Ella Baker’s assertion and reading the narratives of the above eleven community psychologists is not only to celebrate the achievements of individuals but to acknowledge the essential need to participate in various collective enterprises. It is by being a part of collaborative enterprises that we experience community and thereby are able to be a community psychologist with more pluck. To the extent that being a community psychologist is being out of the mainstream, even marginal, within the larger profession of psychology, there may be fewer opportunities to receive validation and the respect we appreciate from colleagues in psychology. Creating personal resources for myself has been pivotal to my own efforts to maintain and enlarge my spirit. A challenge for community psychology is to be able to create communities within our own settings so as to enlarge the meaning of our work for our colleagues and ourselves. When we are engaged participants in our own settings we can have a deeper sense of the meaning of community “out there”. Being a collaborative participant in our own settings where we contribute to our own newly shared communities makes it possible to increase our pluck as well as contribute to the pluck of others. In addition to acknowledging five of the personal resources, they influenced the four proposed agendas. Devoting energy to these agendas may help give us new intellectual resources that in turn can contribute to our unique place in psychology, a field which may not always value work that is action oriented and intertwined with communities outside the university setting. Here are five persons from different disciplines, who have helped my resolve and enhanced my own spirit. Then, I will comment on the four agendas. For me, there have been many sources of inspiration maybe very similar to yours. There are family, friends, mentors, music, theatre, reading biographies, autobiographies, as well creating settings to celebrate persons and accomplishments. These are powerful and essential. My investment and immersion in community research has expanded my wisdom, which has made me a more enlightened person. I am very grateful to the many community leaders and foundation staff and colleagues from other disciplines that have enriched my knowledge and my soul. I celebrate the following five persons whose ideas and presence have helped my spirit. While they are not the only resources that were influential at critical periods of my work, these five people, through their words and deeds, helped me to continue on my search for what I believed was my emerging career. They inspired me to keep at it. They still do. They form my silent collective anchors for my identity and have been resources to generate pluck. These five persons have inspired me and have affected how I have thought about the four proposed agendas: systems, interdisciplinary work, the practice of community organizing, and the role of culture in our work. First, I will mention something of the context of my graduate education. When I was at the University of Texas in the mid 1950s, most faculty communicated, both explicitly and implicitly, that the good and true psychologist did experiments and basic research, and did not do applied investigations or work directly with citizens as equal participants. There were some notable exceptions like Ira Iscoe, Lou Moran and Wayne Holtzman who told me that a psychologist did not need to restrict oneself to be only the detached observer. I COULD be accepted among psychologists when I worked directly with citizens as co-investigators. As I thought of myself as a different psychologist, I did not begin this developmental process with much clarity or self-confidence. I had a silent angst that I would be perceived as incorrect, second-class, deviant or an embarrassment to myself or my former teachers. This process of identifying personal resources became a life long expedition. The following five persons’ writings and presence made a substantial impact on my spirit. They are a psychiatrist, anthropologist, psychologist, philosopher, and a poet. I have had the very good fortune to meet and know four of these persons. I know Ludwig Wittgenstein only from his writings. In 1958, I began a post-doctoral fellowship with Erich Lindemann of Harvard Medical School (Lindemann 1956,1979; Satin, 1982). Ten years before, he had created a multidisciplinary mental health clinic in the town of Wellesley Massachusetts which became a pioneering preventive service, and 14 years before, the national community mental health movement. Both the model and Erich’s own informal style and personality of being creative without being pompous and being a great listener and supportive person encouraged me to believe that I could develop a career as a psychologist working in the community. The presence of active people from different professions in Wellesley and Boston excited me about the prospects of working collaboratively with other social scientists and citizens. It was unusual at that time for a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst to think in terms of community systems. Erich was an accomplished system thinker. I was fortunate to have this watershed experience immediately after receiving my Ph.D. Those 2 years were essential years for I discovered a new paradigm in public health with its preventive and community based traditions. My spirit was soaring. I found an intellectual home that was far beyond the niches of psychology at the time. It is not only Erich alone, but also the settings he created in Wellesley and at Massachusetts General Hospital, that congealed my identity. I was exposed to the benefits of intellectual and ideological collaboration. A larger intellectual community was active in this new enterprise in which Don Klein was one of the key resources. I was at the right place at the right time and had the rare privilege of being mentored by a supportive person who encouraged me to create my own ideas. 30 years later in talking with Betty Lindemann, his widow, I learned of the political and personal costs he suffered within his own medical and psychiatric community because of his steadfast values to work collaboratively with social scientists and citizens as co-equals. At the time, to do this was heresy. This knowledge endeared him even more. In the spring of 1960, during the second post-doctoral year at the Harvard School of Public Health, I enrolled in a course taught by the anthropologist Ben Paul (1911–2005). We read “Water Boiling in a Peruvian Town,” a report of a two-year research project by the anthropologist, Ed Wellin, published in 1955 (Wellin 1955, 1998; Kelly 2000). Wellin presented a beautiful example of how it was necessary for Wellin and a rural hygiene worker to immerse themselves into the village to understand the complexities of the social fabric of this small community of 200 households. He wanted to understand why certain persons took the health-engendering step to boil water to lower the incidence of typhoid fever while others did not. Wellin was an active listener and intrepid participant in the cultures of the smaller sub communities within this already small community. One of his findings was that in this Peruvian town children were the most frequent water carriers from the nearest stream. Males and females of courtship age and married men did not carry water according to local norms and traditions. Wellin also learned that the acceptable times to boil water was after breakfast and after the noon meal; this is another ecological constraint. I learned that there was a complexity within small communities that could not be understood if one was pre-occupied with being an objective, detached, uninvolved scientist. Understanding class and heritage was learned AFTER obtaining respect from the various sub communities. The improvised methods employed by Wellin were inspiring. He revealed the nascent quality of the town. My spirit was uplifted when I read about the insights of Wellin’s immersion and the processes of his building trust. One of his major findings was that, when stimulating an innovation in a community, it is essential to create cordial and trusting personal relationships between the researcher and the community. This was essential! Today, this is a truism, but then, it was a very provocative and even radical insight. The significance of Wellin’s work for me was that, although the efforts to have citizens boil water had limited success, it was the elegant analysis of the villagers and their various contexts that helped explain the determinants of their behavior. Wellin grappled directly to understand the everyday issues of people and their cultures. Barker spent his entire career (1947–1972) documenting the social settings of a small Kansas town, Oskaloosa by name (Barker 1965; Barker and Schoggen 1973; Schoggen 1989). What he did was document the places where the residents spent their lives. He discovered that places taken for granted and not thought about much were in fact the primary ways in which the town was a viable social system. Settings like “Household Auction Sale,” “High School Boys Basketball Game,” “Restaurants and Diners,” “Drugstores” and “Garages” defined the town. His and his colleagues’ convictions and ingenuity to create methods to document these settings plus his unyielding courage to document places, not individuals alone, had an inspiring impact. While I was not interested in documenting one place for my entire career, I still am amazed at his legacy. In the 1940s, he began to immerse himself in one place and remained to carry out his investment for 25 years. One of his later achievements was to conduct a comparative study of the public settings of Oskaloosa and a town in North Yorkshire England 10 years apart (Barker and Schoggen 1973). One of the stimulating findings was that over the ten-year period Oskaloosa was expanding the number of settings for adolescents. In Yordale, in contrast, new settings were found to be often on the streets and sidewalks for all the residents. This type of analysis encouraged me to think about the qualities of settings and their influence on community life. Barker was not one to publish discrete studies but waited until he had a grasp of the complexities of the town of then some 1,000 people. He lived in the town. No doubt his and his wife’s presence as residents helped his research to be accepted and added to the clarity of his interpretations of the richness of the settings. Barker’s work was a compelling example to actually study places and then raising the novel idea that not only qualities of individuals, but also qualities of places, give insights and knowledge not thought about before. The writings of Wittgenstein were like finding a soul mate (Malcolm 1958; Monk 1990; Wittgenstein 1958). He had written a book in the trenches of World War I that was quickly revered by the newly forming logical positivists. Logical positivists had much influence on psychology especially during the 1920s through 1950s. Their premise was that, if a concept could not be empirically verified, it did not exist. As soon as Wittgenstein was going to be greeted as an intellectual leader for the group, he rejected their tribute and refuted his earlier work. He then went on a constant journey throughout his life to develop another perspective that questioned his own prior work. The content of his ideas and his intellectual toughness, courage and conscience impressed me. I also liked his way of living. He did not accept his part of the family fortune and was not enamored by professional philosophy. I liked the creative independence of his ideas and his spirit. A remark that he made when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was “He is a HUMAN being.” I noted that he could whistle long passages of music from memory. I aspired to do that. He designed a house for his sister down to the doorknobs. I could not do that. He believed that the meaning of concepts was due to the forms of life in which they were embedded. An ecological premise! He also believed that one result of philosophical thinking was: NOT a truth discovered but a confusion dissolved. He was a fresh voice that encouraged my hope to create my own work and not be trapped by tradition or custom or the dominant paradigm. He fueled my hopes to continue on my own journey to break new ground. He became a favorite, invisible uncle. On my home page I have a Wittgenstein quote: “We feel that even when all POSSIBLE scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” When I was at the University of Oregon in the mid 1970s, I went to a meeting of professors advocating more community involvement. The poet, William Stafford, was there. He did not speak except a few words at the very end when he wondered out loud if it was not also important to stay at home and be with family and kin. I was surprised. He then read a poem. After the meeting, I told him that it was a wonderful poem. Could I have a copy? He gave me the hand written lines as a gift. I was stunned. It was then that I began to learn about this Poet Laureate of Oregon who was on the faculty of Lewis and Clark College in Portland (Kitchen 1989; Stafford 1960, 1993). He was a conscientious objector during World War II. He wrote over fifteen books in his poetry career. He said, “I think you create a good poem by revising your life.” If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. Those four lines anchored my search for a collaborative research style especially for the 10 years of work with African American community leaders in Chicago in the 1990s (Kelly 1999). That poem affirmed my inchoate conviction to listen, learn and try to understand the concerns and hopes of these leaders. I was sustained by the commitment of the community leaders and retained in my memory Stafford’s poem. So, these five persons in their presence and work influenced my searching for compatible and inspiring thoughts and deeds. Through their contributions, I developed an awareness of the vitality of thinking in terms of systems and their impact upon individuals and groups, of the excitement of knowing and working with other disciplines. I began to understand the values and hopes for community development through organizing. Each of these five persons also increased my sensitivities to culture. In retrospect, the following four agendas emerged as the soil for my thinking about the ecology of place and the processes for preventive interventions in the community. The following four agendas have merit not only to contribute knowledge but also to benefit our collective spirit. These are more than topics. I am suggesting that if we can continue to engage these agendas, orienting frames of reference, we can enlarge our spirit while we continue to create our identity so that our intellectual activities continue to be interconnected with our emotional commitment to the field. Increase understanding of systems Increase interdisciplinary research and action Increase ties to the work of community organizers Increase an emphasis on culture. Implementing each of these suggestions makes us less dependent on the profession of psychology as our ONLY source of intellectual exchange. Working on these agendas may keep us involved with those soul mates in other disciplines who are engaged in direct, local efforts to increase knowledge of complex social and community systems. These resources are potential antidotes against a too precious elitism and isolation when doing community psychology. There is another feature. By investing in four themes like these, I believe we increase the interdependencies between our research and our actions. The dichotomy between research versus action is de-emphasized, put aside and even evaporated! By continuing to engage with other disciplines concerned with communities as systems, we may expand our knowledge of how to better understand the latent resources and constraints affecting our concepts about individuals. By knowing and working with persons from other disciplines, we are stretching our concepts and methods. By knowing and working with advocates of organizing communities for justice and equity, we are keeping ourselves alert to the systemic constraints limiting dignity and economic and social opportunities. Equally important, we can learn more about how indigenous processes can bring about positive changes in communities. By emphasizing a commitment to culture as a source of explanation and action, we are creating the possibility that our work breaks free of the constraints of ethnocentrism. Like the five persons who influenced me, these four themes continue to provide energy and excitement. I hope they can continue to be resources for you as well. Here are a few thoughts for these four themes: For the first two themes, systems and interdisciplinary training, there are four recent published treatises that are readily available in the American Journal of Community Psychology, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Policy Issues. For the second two themes, community organizing and culture, I offer some personal thoughts. The special issue of the AJCP on System Change Edited by Foster-Fishman and Behrens (2007) is a stimulating example of the contributions of concepts, methods and experiences of various disciplines, including psychology, to understand and produce system change, a core interest of many community psychologists. Some of the fruitful concepts I learned seem very germane to understand systemic change. Some examples are large group discussion techniques, the concepts of social capital, stocks and flows and system level tracking logs. Reading this special issue was like being presented a catalyst for further thinking. When I first read these contributions (Kelly 2007), I was once again reminded of the new demands and ways of working when creating a new approach or paradigm. Many of the contributors of this special issue mentioned that their investment ranged over 5–7 years. How do teams of investigators, colleagues in other disciplines, students and citizens sustain their pluck over such a time period? What are the implications for doctoral training for such concentrated and extended periods of time devoted to seeing indices of system change realized? What are the personal costs of being engaged with system change? How do funding sources support these efforts? How can the promotion and tenure process be redefined to sanction such challenging and demanding efforts? Engaging systemic topics may have demands not only for the participants but those who evaluate the work. Here is where personal and organizational resources can become a ballast against alienation, burn out and a possible relapse to more conventional enterprises. I have found it fruitful to consider how system concepts can be useful in the design of preventive interventions as well as more applied, activist research (Kelly et al. 2000). System concepts provide us who are trained in psychology to view the individual as nested in a variety of places. So, the focus on the individual becomes a focus on the connections between the system and the person. This further entails developing concepts and methods that are sensitive to the interplay between person and place. System concepts are a resource to view connections and interrelationships between the person AND place, not only to focus upon either person or place (Kelly 2006). One example of the theoretical AND practical benefits of thinking in systems concepts is expressed in the work of Campbell (2008). She and colleagues have directly addressed three primary systems that can negatively impact rape victims. Campbell and colleagues and others have pointed out with a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods that the rape victims’ experiences with the legal, medical or mental health systems can further compound the sexually violent experience of being raped. Fortunately there are now alternative systems for care, advocacy and prevention such as rape victim advocates, sexually assault nurse examiner programs and Rape Crisis Centers that are salient alternative systems to the noxious and more traditional, more ingrained systems. The collective benefits of these alternative systems of care are that the negative effects of the traditional entropic systems are reduced. While I briefly mention the AJCP Special Issue and the work of Campbell, both deserve your appraisal for their catalytic impact on our research agendas. Creating reliable, accessible supportive resources as we engage in system research is a topic that is congruent with our values. The advantages of utilizing systems science as a complementary method for addressing complex problems include the fact that nonlinear relationships, the unintended effects of intervening in the system, and time-delayed effects are often missed with traditional reductionist approaches, whereas systems approaches excel at detecting these (Mabry et al. 2008). Mabry’s insights suggest that systems concepts are valuable in interdisciplinary work, which is the next topic. As a result of the systems thinking of Erich Lindemann, I concentrated on becoming ecological (Kelly 2006). I have benefited from doing work that generates opportunities to be immersed in such systems as high schools, elementary schools, advocacy organizations, multidisciplinary research groups and community organizing organizations. What I have learned is that there is benefit to think beyond the qualities or traits of persons and to reframe the topic of personal qualities as adaptive and affected by our places. People are thought of as members of communities and organizations without thinking about them only as individuals. This investment in system concepts is a life long challenge to understand the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of being in one place or another. The Special Issue edited by Foster Fishman and Behrens, the companion appraisal by Porter, Bothne, and Jason and the research of Campbell give us intellectual nurturance as we continue this journey. Another Special Issue of AJCP on the topic of community based interdisciplinary research and education edited by Maton et al. (2006) gives examples of how the conversations and collaborations with scholars from other disciplines can potentially enhance the work of community psychology AND enhance our spirit as we connect with others who share our goals. Included in this Special Issue are cogent ideas, intellectual resources and cautions to engage in interdisciplinary work. Five case examples focus upon such topics as research with older minority adults, a HIV prevention project with married men in urban poor communities in Mumbai, India, a food collective with eight disciplines promoting healthy foods in a working class African American community, and a process for bringing together design and social science students to learn about working in communities. I found the Special Issue to be a very motivating resource. The contributors also focus on the constraints that may inhibit interdisciplinary work. Stokols (2006, pp. 68–69), in reviewing case studies of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration, mentions not only are such collaborations highly labor intensive but contextual factors also strongly influence collaborative readiness. Such work requires extensive preparation, practice and refinement. It is implicit in the framing of the topic that there is a requirement to address some of the constraints. If not, these intellectual adventures can reduce our spirit. Shinn (2006), Nash (2008) and Hall et al. (2008) each in their own way offer sobering reminders that interdisciplinary work is not for every one. Most importantly, the interaction of personal, organizational, institutional, cultural and systemic factors all interact to provide either constraints or resources for such boundary spanning work. An antidote to reduce the stress of engaging in such boundary spanning activities that can dampen our spirit is to be tough minded and savvy about the necessary conditions to undertake work that transcends traditional norms for disciplinary expeditions. The challenge of overcoming our silos is overwhelming. Those of us in different (departments) have been trained differently; we have read different kinds of books; we use different languages; we evaluate the quality of research data and evidence quite differently; and we have very different assessments of what it takes to do good research. Oftentimes, we don’t even respect one another. Syme’s assessment argues for a companion effort to create support systems to maintain our pluck while we participate in new paradigmatic efforts. Help is on the way! There is a major beginning at scoping in on the processes of working beyond the boundaries of disciplines. A group of papers published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2008), steered by SCRA member, Dan Stokols, is in the midst of grappling with the processes of transdisciplinary work (Stokols 2006; Hall et al. 2008). Willingness to commit sufficient time to such collaborative endeavors, open to learning each other’s disciplinary language and jargon, capacity to build mutual confidence and trust, including with community members and practitioners, and overcoming the challenge of working as equals, with no knowledge or discipline or practice assuming priority (Hadiyono 2002). “Individuals who value collaboration, support a culture of sharing, and embrace a transdisciplinary ethic are well-suited for transdisciplinary teams” (Stokols et al. 2008a, b, pp. 35, 106). We, community psychologists, can be very congenial members of team science! The two special AJCP publications and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine special supplement on team science are fertile starting points to increase our sophistication about these two enterprises: system change and transdisciplinary inquiry. These contributions identify the constraints as well as suggest resources that can point to the potential satisfactions coming to us when we reach out and plug into dialogues with other disciplines. We can do so without dampening or mitigating our spirit. We can increase our sense of validation in being with other colleagues