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

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

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.

Igniting the Power of Community: The Role of CBOs and NGOs in Global Public Health introduces readers to the pursuit and potential of community-based organizations and nongovernmental organizations to transform global public health. At a time of unprecedented challenges, economic crises, social inequalities, environmental stressors, emerging health threats, these organizations are initiating and driving change, often being the first to call attention to the issues and increasingly forging significant and sustainable solutions. Through concrete examples, success stories, and cautionary tales from experienced practitioners, Igniting the Power of Community demonstrates why understanding the roles of the diverse organizations of this sector is vital to anyone concerned with improving health and public health today. This forward-thinking book explains how citizen sector organizations work, their immediate and long term impact on public health, and the key players and business dynamics involved. With an emphasis on innovative approaches, it provides an "insiders view" into practical considerations regarding organizational structure, financing, and operations. A sampling of the coverage: The new era of social entrepreneurship and philanthropy Sustainability in international public health NGOs Front-line perspectives from both well-established and grassroots CBOs Faith-based organizations and public health NGOs and the military: evolving relationships in conflict and disaster zones Understanding the environmental health movement and its impact Project YEAH: a youth AIDS organizations story. Whether you are involved in clinical care, health research, public health programs, or policy development and implementation, this book provides key insights and skills, and will serve as an invaluable resource in working most effectively with and within these dynamic organizations. body>

Fifteen years ago, Concha Delgado-Gaitan began literacy research in Carpinteria, California. At that time, Mexican immigrants who labored in nurseries, factories, and housekeeping, had almost no voice in how their children were educated. Committed to participative research, Delgado-Gaitan collaborated with the community to connect family, school, and community. Regular community gatherings gave birth to the Comit de Padres Latinos. Refusing the role of the victim, the Comit paticipants organized to reach out to everyone in the community, not just other Latino families. Bound by their language, cultural history, hard work, respect, pain, and hope, they created possibilities that supported the learning of Latino students, who until then had too often dropped out or shown scant interest in school. In a society that accentuates individualism and independence, these men and women look to their community for leadership, support, and resources for children. The Power of Community is a critical work that shows how communities that pull together and offer caring ears, eyes, and hands, can ensure that their children thrive--academically, socially, and personally. It offers a fresh approach and workable solution to the problems that face schools today.

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.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With stark poignancy and political dispassion Tightrope addresses the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. This must-read book from the authors of Half the Sky “shows how we can and must do better” (Katie Couric). "A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I've read on the state of our disunion."—Tara Westover, author of Educated Drawing us deep into an “other America,” the authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the people with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon. It’s an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About a quarter of the children on Kristof’s old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. While these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.

" We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "

Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure. Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.

As co-owner of four CrossFit affiliate gyms, Allison Wenglin Belger juggles management of the family business, her work as a licensed psychologist and fitness coach, and her role as mom to two young daughters. She knows first-hand the importance of community—of having a network of mutual support and human connection in the midst of our hectic, technology-driven lives. A former division-one collegiate soccer player and five-time marathoner, she has also been part of the wilderness adventure community and has trained for various elite athletic events, competing both individually and as part of a team. Belger takes the reader on a journey from her childhood in suburban New York as she follows her passion for fitness and sport, with pleasures and pitfalls along the way, finding a new dimension in the CrossFit culture and its emphasis on camaraderie and community. She explains the transformative aspects of CrossFit's physically and mentally demanding workouts as performed with others. Drawing on her psychology doctoral research, Belger describes the emotional and physical benefits of participation in an affinity group. She shares the stories of military wounded warriors and everyday heroes who have faced life-threatening illness—all with the help of their community affiliation. She relates inspiring examples of individuals who have created communities and support networks for populations in need, including underprivileged youth and cancer patients. With her unique perspective as psychologist and athlete, the author explores the mind-body connection and how it can relate to all of us. Through her compelling narratives, each of which intersects with the CrossFit experience, Belger encourages us to examine our own lives and relationships so that we may find motivation and meaning in a world of stress and challenge—if we are open to the power of community.