CPN - About CPN

Strengthening communities means more than bringing people and neighborhoods together: it is about what people can accomplish by working together. It involves recognizing that even the most troubled communities have strengths to build on, not only problems to solve. In the poorest communities, mediating institutions—schools, churches, and the like—often play an important role in developing and maintaining social networks and generating hope and capacity for change. Outside service providers and community residents alike need to recognize these strengths and think of their work as public, collaborative, interactive, and relational.

To understand the strengths and resources of a community is often difficult (even for the people who live there!) because people—especially professionals and service providers—are taught to think in terms of what communities lack, what they need, or what is missing, that they can then provide. Coming to understand the strengths of a community takes time. It means finding community "informants": people who can tell you about the elderly woman who gives people solid advice, the newspaper boy who checks on the shut ins, or the preacher kids look to for moral guidance. It means taking an inventory, or making a "map," of community assets. Finally, it requires a particular mindset: learning to see a community as half full, not as half empty.

So while AmeriCorps members can help meet immediate needs of communities, the real test of any service initiative is what it builds upon, and what it leaves behind.

The fact that civic work cannot be done alone, no matter how strong your individual sense of civic responsibility, makes the work of citizenship and service bigger than any one of us; it is what makes your work challenging, even difficult, but also exciting. Working with others, rather than just doing things for them, builds community capacity.

To do this effectively, you need to understand the concepts of diversity and public life and learn how to use these ideas to strengthen your work.

When was the first time you noticed you were different? Or, when was the first time you remember seeing people different from yourself? How did it feel to be different? Often such experiences are frightening, awkward, or at the very least, difficult. These feelings can lead you to shy away from such experiences.

However, when you try to solve problems by working only with people who are like you, it is similar to starting a band with four drummers—it limits your repertoire. Working with differences lets you create an entire orchestra that is versatile enough to play pop, jazz, classical, or rap.

To strengthen community capacity you need to seek out differences —different people, viewpoints and ideas—and use these differences to solve problems. It is like finding all of the string players, wind instrumentalists, and percussionists it takes to make great music. It takes time and effort, but in the end it is worth it. Uncovering the many differences that exist within and among communities will reveal a kind of collective wisdom which can be tapped as you strive to solve the complex problems you face.

Public life assumes and is premised upon the idea of diversity, the idea that there are people who are different from you, your family, and close friends.

Do you remember the first time you realized that you were "in public"? Perhaps you were waiting at the bus stop on your way to school with kids you didn't know. Or you were at the grocery store with your parents and suddenly realized that there are a lot more people in the world than your family and friends. Recognizing that you are in public means realizing that you live alongside people who aren't part of your familiar world.

Public life is . . . where you become aware of hopes and concerns you share with a wide variety of people, and where you act on them. It is where you learn the value of hearing many different viewpoints, are held accountable for your actions, and experience the challenge of having to earn recognition and respect. It is where your actions, contributions, commitment, and effectiveness determine how seriously people take you.

Private life is . . . where you seek close, supportive relationships with family, friends, and other people from similar backgrounds. It is where you gain acceptance for just being yourself, and not so much for what you contribute.

This can make us sound more dichotomous than holistic. But actually, each of us needs a balance of both in order to be a whole person.

First, it is the place where an organized group (outside of your immediate family and friends) acts together to solve public problems.

Second, it is the way you act and the skills you need when you're working to solve these problems. You behave differently in public life than in private life because you want to accomplish different goals in each arena. The chart below outlines some of these differences. You are both a private and a public person at the same time. It is important to understand which side should predominate when you are in different places, doing different things. Most of us can think of times when private behavior slipped into public work. When this happens, it becomes harder to work with the many different types of people and ideas necessary to solve public problems.

Public Life

Where you are: school, work.
What it's like: open, diverse.
What you give: accountability.
What you get: respect, power.
How you act: strategic.
Skills you use: negotiation, judgment.

Where you are: home, with family and friends.
What it's like: closed, similar.
What you give: loyalty.
What you get: love, self-esteem.
How you act: spontaneous, intimate.
Skills you use: accommodation, opinion.

This exercise helps you: Identify the diversity within yourself and imagine what others see when they look at you.

It helps to strengthen community capacity because: Most likely, you rarely think of yourself as being the one who is different. This change of perspective is necessary if you plan to work with others using diversity, which is at the heart of community capacity.

Instructions

Individuals: Complete the activity and questions below individually. Time limit: 10 minutes.

Whole group: Then as a group, share your answers. Discuss the ways in which the answers vary and what they tell you about diversity. Time limit: 20 minutes.

List five nouns that describe who you are [i.e., "I am a(n)______________"]. Use single words only. [Examples: "soprano," "Korean-American," "athlete," "Republican," "brother."]

How many of the things you listed above would be visible to someone who was meeting you for the first time?

What does that tell you about getting to know somebody? Can you "judge a book by its cover"?

Recognizing the diverse perspectives others have and acting effectively in public requires that you learn to listen and see other people's self- interest. In a diverse society, the ones who can listen learn the most. Since thinking of other people's perspectives does not happen automatically, the skills of active listening and interviewing to discover diverse self-interests are important.

People who listen well are seldom appreciated in this society. Television—a one-way medium—is a strong force in the U.S., and value is placed on talking, waiting to talk, and passive listening. The office secretary who takes the minutes at a meeting is not valued, yet whatever he or she reports afterward will be the official account of the proceedings.

What you discover about listening is that no one can have a monopoly over it. Anyone can listen well.

As you think about the community in which you work and your relationship to it, think about how your work would be different if you could take more time to explore the perspectives of the community members. What could you learn?

Ask direct questions: This way the talker will tell you what is important to her.

Avoid asking "yes or no" questions: They are too quick and you don't learn much. If you do ask them, follow up with "why?"

Listen: Build on what your interviewee has already said. This involves paying close attention to what is said. Actually, an interviewee who feels "listened to" is likely to talk more than someone who feels ignored.

Ask questions: Don't allow too much empty time—ask questions to keep the conversation flowing. Look for connections and contrasts in experience between yourself and your interviewee, but resist launching into long stories about yourself. The other person should be doing the majority of the talking.

Check that you understand: Clarify what the talker is saying by restating what you've heard and asking if you've got it right.

Keep it public: Interviewing to discover self-interest is a good exercise in finding out where public information ends and private information begins. Of course, it's different for everybody. If you ask a question that is too personal, your interviewee will probably tell you. Don't push it.

It helps strengthen community capacity because: Interviewing is a great way to make sure you are listening—the key to identifying and using the diversity that is at the heart of community capacity. It is an essential skill for finding out how and why someone's self-interest has led them into public life.

Instructions

Small groups: Pair up in a way that matches people who are as different as possible. If there are age or racial differences in the group, or differences in academic interest or political lean, take advantage of these by mixing people around.

Interview each other and find as many differences as you can in how you view things. After all, it is only in relation to someone else that you can see how different you are. What music do you like? What makes you angry? What places would you like to visit? How do you spend your time? Where were you born? What was or is your favorite or least favorite subject at school?

Remember, these are public interviews. You want to find out what is important to them and how they are different from you, but don't dig for private secrets.

Whole group: When you have both interviewed one another, introduce one another to the whole group. Comment on what differences you've discovered. Time limit: 2 minutes per person.

In order for you to get things done, you need to know what resources are available to you. Resources, in the form of people and relationships, as well as money, space, knowledge, and the like, constitute a community's civic capacities. The process of fact finding often starts by talking to the people you have already interviewed for self- interest. The difference between the two types of interviews is in focus: Self-interest interviews probe for diverse perspectives and experiences; informational interviews target specific community capacities.

Don't make demands: Don't approach an interview with the idea of solving any particular problem. Just ask for the information you need.

Prepare: Before you meet with someone, plan ahead and practice. What questions do you think he or she will have?

Evaluate: After the meeting, ask yourself, What went well? What didn't? What do you need to do next?

Closely connected to the process of interviewing is the idea of the civic inventory—a survey of the diverse characteristics and capacities of a community. Civic inventories enable you to learn what a community is bringing to the problem-solving process and give you a base upon which to build your work.

Having this base of knowledge will connect you to the community and add new perspectives to your work. It may even lead you to change the way you define your work.

This exercise asks you to: Document the strengths and capacities of the community in which you are working, recognizing that you are not starting from scratch.

It helps to strengthen community capacity because: There is power in simply naming a community's resources, especially communities recognized more for their problems than their potential. In addition, you have to know what a community's resources are before you can build on them and use them to get things done.

Instructions

After interviewing your colleagues and other members of the community in which you are working, complete the following survey, keeping your AmeriCorps work in mind. List as many resources as you can, continuing on the back or on another sheet. If this is overly difficult, you may want to conduct more interviews or re-interview those to whom you have already spoken, then redo the exercise. Time limit: 20 minutes.

Once you have finished, share your work with others. Do they agree with your assessment? What do they have to add? Time limit: 30 minutes.

Public problem solving is a primary goal of citizenship and service. People get involved in public life only when they see something important that they want to change. Depending on who you are, where you come from, and what you have experienced, you will see different problems or look at problems from a different perspective than people who are unlike you.

While it is important to recognize your own self-interest around a problem, it is equally important to recognize others'. This is why problem definition is placed in this chapter: Problems can only be defined in relation to the community in which they are found, the capacities the community brings to solve them, and the input of diverse perspectives that accompany public life.

The first step in solving any problem is to clearly define it. While this may seem obvious, problem definition is a step most groups ignore; they simply assume a shared understanding and move on to developing solutions. The result can be an unhealthy level of tension and conflict due to a lack of mutual agreement on the exact nature of the problem at hand. Only after a group has wrestled with the difficult task of specifically defining the problem can members identify their self-interests around it and move toward solutions.

Focus: Groups often form around large scale issues, such as the environment or crime. To move from the motivating issue to a manageable, actionable problem, ask yourselves several questions: "Why is this important to us? Where is this a problem? How does it affect us?"

Tie your problem to a larger public issue: If you start with a workable, narrow problem, relate it to a larger public problem. This is key to recognizing the complexity of a problem and understanding how your issue affects others. For instance, if you have noticed that children in your community do not have anywhere to go after school, you can tie that to bigger issues, such as the lack of safe alternatives to hanging out in the streets, joining gangs, etc. You will still work on solving your local problem, but you'll see how it fits into the big picture. This will prompt you to develop strategies that tie you and your group to other people with different interests and power.

Know the difference between problems and solutions: Be sure you are defining a problem, not articulating a solution. For example, a group of people may decide that there ought to be increased security in their local schools. However, this is not a problem, it's a solution. The problem in this case is likely to be the incidents of violence in schools. Once this is made clear, the group can look at a wide variety of solutions—including teaching conflict resolution strategies, providing more student counseling, or increasing security. This will give them more power to negotiate and a better chance for success.

This point is especially important for AmeriCorps members. As such, you may be assigned a particular task—to tutor a child or organize a soup kitchen, for instance—designed to solve a problem, without the problem ever being clearly defined. Moving back to this first step, in partnership with the people with whom you work, will give you a better understanding of how your work fits into a larger picture and the flexibility to modify your tasks should that be necessary. Remember, the goal is not, for example, to tutor children; the goal is to help children earn better grades, increase the likelihood they will finish high school, or whatever specific problem people see relating to children's success in school. If a tutoring program does not accomplish this, something else might.

Once your group has agreed on a problem it wants to solve, you can create a mission statement. Writing a mission statement is useful for a number of reasons. First, it helps you lay out your purpose. Does everyone really understand, and agree about, what your goals are? Building a mission statement will show you yet again how diverse interests can work together to solve a common problem in a community context. Second, a mission statement creates public accountability: A statement of what the group is about can be shown to others to get their feedback, and can be used to gauge accomplishments.

Taking the time to put in writing what you intend to do and accomplish will not only provide your AmeriCorps program with the documentation it needs, but will ensure that everyone involved understands what is going to be done and what is expected of each person involved. It will also help connect you, as an AmeriCorps member, to the community in which you are working and clearly show the relationships among your AmeriCorps program, the community, the larger issue being addressed, the specific problem being solved, the tasks to be completed, and you.

While there is no set formula for mission statements, important elements include:

Citizenship and service allows you to take action on public problems, and before you can act on a problem you have to know what you want to act on. Mission statements put your problem, and plan, into writing to help guide your work. Investing the time to get things started on the right foot will make it easier to actually get things done.

This exercise asks you to: Write a mission statement for your citizenship and service work.

It helps to strengthen community capacity because: Once you put your goals and plans in writing you can not only ask "How well will we solve the problem at hand?" but "How well does this mission build the capacity of the community to address this, and other problems, it may want to tackle?" Depending on your answers and the response of community members to this written mission statement, you may choose to modify your plans.

As a group, complete the following paragraph. You may want to alter the language or format to better suit your needs. Time limit: 30 minutes.

When you have finished, present your work to others with whom you work, especially to involved members of the community, for their feedback. Does your statement need to be modified?

We, the _______, believe that _______ is a serious problem in this community, contributing to _______ . We propose to _______.
We believe that this will help solve the problem by _______ .
In order to implement this solution, we intend to _______.