Online Videos for Community & Administrative Practice (updated)

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Resident Associations, Resources

This is a list compiled by Professor Dick Schoech of the School of Social Work, University of Texas Arlington. He received these suggestions from members of COMM-ORG and ACOSA. Ten of these videos are available on YouTube, and I’ve organized them into this a playlist, which you can play (in the order listed) by clicking on the video below, or by viewing the series on youtube . Other videos which are available online, but not on YouTube, are also linked below. Several recommended videos are not available online. They may be available in stores, or at a library near you, so I’ve linked to WorldCat entries, when I could find them there. There’s a longer list of videos here and in this playlist of videos on community & engagement.

Shinichi Murota Doshisha University, Japan

  • Make the Road NY is probably the most active and powerful grassroots organization in NYC today.
  • Time’s Up is a bicycle rider’s organization whose activity is basically a public ride to advocate for greener streets and riders friendly urban planning.
  • Common Ground is a famous community development project for homeless. Their approach is not quite “social work” per say, but they have made some impacts in the community.

Ben MacConnell, Direct Action & Research Training Center

  • DART just posted a new video on community organizing. It also serves as decent intro for a new observer, so I thought it may be of use to you.

David William Rothwell

Rich Wood – Lots of resources via PICO website as well, some written some video, see:

Dick Schoech, UT Arlington

  • Online Volunteering
  • Building Enduring Communities: Development, property management, and residence- and community-based human services, nonprofit affordable housing social services.
  • The Charlie Rose show has great interviews with current thinkers and doers. For example, this conversation with Michael Milken & Muhammad Yunus about World poverty.
  • Tracy J. Browns explains the Nine Essential Internal Controls that every Faith Based or Community Organization must have.
  • Circles of Caring
  • The Secret to Getting Things Right (audio) How did the humblest tool for organizing data reduce complications in surgical practice, streamline restaurant operations, and minimize the risks of venture capital? An hour with Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande, author of “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right”. I found the discussion very relevant since human services folks routinely handle a lot of complex situations. Almost all the conclusions on the failure to prevent child abuse by CPS come to a failure to do things due to fatigue, lack of training, etc. We could use more checklists in our field to insure we get things right.

Videos Not Online

Elizabeth Beck

  • I use something called Holding Ground about Dudley Street or Streets of Hope to show Rothman’s three approaches,
  • I use Bill Moyers interview with Myles Horton (vol 2) to show community participation, adult education and pedagogy of the oppressed
  • I use a Philip Randolph which is 90 minutes called something like Jobs and Freedom to show among others things coalition building.

Christina Erickson

Nicole Nicotera, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver

  • I like to use Holding Ground about the Dudley Street neighborhood initiative near Boston MA.
  • There is also a book about their process called, Streets of Hope by Medoff and Sklar (1994) South End Press.
  • Another DVD that may be useful, but I have not used in class myself is called “I am a Promise.”

Karen Gray, Asst Professor, OU-Tulsa School of Social Work, Tulsa, OK 74135

Dick Schoech, UT Arlington

Others mentioned

The Craigslist Foundation San Francisco Gathering, Part 2

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Resident Associations, Resources

Toward the end of 2009, the Craigslist Foundation began a series of discussions around their plans to focus the foundation’s efforts on strengthening communities, with some emphasis on neighborhood-based communities. This began with a meeting at The Case Foundation in Washington DC, which included Michael Smith, Kari Dunn, Cindy Gallop, Jessica Kirkwood, Marsha Semmel, Michael Karpman, Rhonda Taylor, Ron Carlee, and Siobhan Canty. They “chatted about the need of organizations with libraries of unpublished case studies and ideas, connecting local changemakers with the big picture of systemic change, bringing essential info to people at exactly the time they need it most, and using storytellers to communicate long (or boring) case studies in more entertaining and inspiring ways.” (see How Can We Build On One Another’s Successes?)

In the second meeting, at end of January 2010, they gathered twelve more friends in San Francisco “for a different take on the conversation: Beth Kanter, Chris Gates, Craig Newmark, Frank Schulenburg, Gwyneth Borden, John Lyman, Kate Stahnke, Matt Garcia, Pamela Wheelock, Peggy Duvette, Rob Miller, and making it all amazingly fun was our facilitator Allen Gunn. Here, we talked a lot about the importance of people over information, how to reach those who aren’t online, what motivates people to tell their success stories, which organizations have already been doing work in this area, and what audiences might be most in need of improved information flow.”

A week later, they posted their “theory of change”: that “that place-based communities and neighborhoods must be strengthened if our society is to flourish and our democracy advance — and that Craigslist Foundation can play a catalytic role in assembling the talents of key partners and collaborators capable of offering people in communities the tools and resources they need to take greater responsibility for where they live, work, and play.” (see Catalyst for Community Vitality)

In this article, they also said “this translates into a role for us in convening successful organizations and people across all sectors — nonprofit, government, business, philanthropy — to work intentionally and together toward building stronger local communities and economies.” A month later, on  March 9, Craigslist Foundation announced that it was going on the road to learn more about “how people build stronger neighborhoods and what prevents others from joining in the fun.” They hosted small group discussions in Washington DC, New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Austin, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon in March and April.

I was part of the seventh and last of these meetings, posted photos of participants and their ideas, and transcribed their post-it notes below. Also in this meeting: Aaron Goodman, Ali Williams, Amelia Kolokihakaufisi , Anne Marie Engel, Bruce Richard, Clint Mitchell, Ka Yun Cheng, Karen Kwok, Kathie Lowry, Kristarae Flynn, Terri Forman, Maura Mccarthy, Nick McClintock,  Patrick Flanagan, Peggy Simmons, Toby Leavitt, and Winston Dong.

To keep track of the discussions and to create “a place to listen to the community, share some of our ideas, highlight cool projects we encounter, and generally keep the community up to date as our programs are developed”, CLF created the lab at craigslist foundation, and a uservoice forum that asks people to submit and vote on answers to the questions: What stops you from impacting your community? What has worked well for you?

Things I know that I wish I could share with leaders in other communities

Can't read the one on the top left

  • I didn’t get a good snap of this, sorry (see pic), so the way it reads to me is this: How do you break down barriers to regorible thaking? (i.e. minimize appepridics of competrif nit & cissided resources)
  • Illegible/illegible mentoring
  • I don’t wish, I share
  • The adventure of education abroad
  • How many options there are for raising money
  • How to create concepts that are large scale, inventive, and sizzling in getting people in cohesion faster
  • I know good ways of getting people of very different backgrounds together, as equals, so everyone walks away changed
  • How to facilitate community action/impact of people averse to talking to institutions and developers (more…)

Neighborhood-based community building handbooks recommended by Jim Diers

in Asset-Based Community Development, community engagement, Place-based communities, Resident Associations, Resources

“Few people in this country know as much about community building as Jim Diers,” said  Fred Kent, President of Project for Public Spaces (PPS). From 1988 to 2002, Jim led Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods which is “widely known as the most innovative effort in the U.S. to empower local residents” (John P. Kretzmann, Co-director or the Asset-Based Community Development Institute).

Jim’s been dragged all over the world by people and orgs keen to learn from his real-world experience as a community builder. He’s currently on a tour through Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada, and the US. (It’s not really a book tour, but a lot of the discussions revolve around the ideas and practices detailed in his must-read book Neighbor Power.) Yet he somehow found time to answer my request.

In my own experience as a community organizer, I’ve found that it’s so much easier to get things moving when people don’t have to first invent the wheel. So I like workbooks. Our Blocks recently featured one workbook,which I thought was the best I’d seen so far. I asked Jim if others came to mind. He said he’d give it more thought when he had more time, but off the top of his head:

  1. The Organizer’s Workbook, published by the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center -  a roadmap to discovering, organizing and engaging your neighborhood. (This is the workbook we’d previously featured, as noted above. Incidentally, I corresponded this week with INRC Executive Director Anne-Marie Taylor, who said she’d “love to hear how folks outside of Indianapolis are utilizing this Workbook”.)
  2. The Great Neighborhood Book, by Jay Walljasper, published by PPS. (In the Great Minds Think Alike category, this book was also recommended to us by UMass Professor Emeritus Bill Berkowitz, Development Partner at the Community Tool Box.)

Not a workbook, but something Jim brought up in relation to my plans to do community-building work in the Philippines: From Clients to Citizens – Deepening the Practice of Asset-Based and Citizen-Led Development (pdf) – Conversations from the ABCD Forum, July 8 – 10, 2009. Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Edited by Alison Mathie and Deborah Puntenney. December 2009. The Coady International Institute published this under a CC-ANSA license, very nice of them.

Thanks for your recommendations Jim.

Other recent articles on Jim Diers by friends of Our Blocks: Jim Diers on citizen action by Kevin Harris at Neighborhoods; Getting back to Government Is Us at Socialreporter (which includes a beer-powered interview by David Wilcox). You can also find Jim’s talks on The Youtubes, three of which (so far) we’ve added to our Videos collection. Not recent but still fresh, this hour-long conversation on KUOW (note: turns out there’s a difference between mating calls and meeting calls).