A buzzing sound can mean many things. When I was a kid growing up on an Iowa farm, a buzzing sound usually meant bees were near by...typically a scary thing since I was pretty sure they had me in their tiny stinger sights. Ah, but there are buzzing sounds that are not at all scary and indicate good things are happening. I heard one just like that last week in Buffalo, New York.
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Recently I have been ruminating on the difference between community engagement and community mobilization. "Ruminate" is a great word for a Leap Day because the extra day gives us more time to really think on something, right? In the United States, where I do much of my work, we seem to prefer the term mobilization more than engagement, though we sometimes refer to mobilization as engagement and vice versa.
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Here we go again. It is the Quadrennial Quest for the next "great" leader of the United States. It is too bad we are fixated on a Presidential leadership model that has not worked well in the recent past and increasingly holds little hope for the future. Are we ready to embrace a different approach to leadership that is a better practice now and in the future?
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I have a tolerate/hate relationship with community needs assessments. I really wanted to write that I have a love/hate relationship with them but that would be dishonest. I do not love them at all, but I do understand their importance and will tolerate them...barely. In fact, I have designed them, conducted them, and used them to inform and guide work on community projects and initiatives.
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An emphasis on using "evidence based practices" is stifling experimentation. This was the statement I posed in a poll within my last blog, back in February 2015, just before I got sucked into a vortex of Federal grant writing from which I am only now extracting myself. The results are in and a full 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the statement is true.
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