Community Action Reinforcing Empowerment
Community Action Reinforcing Empowerment
Community-Based Holistic Trauma Informed Social Work Practice with Veterans
CARE Sustainable Community Transformation
The use of Allegory in experiential education
Allegory of the City of Midway
City of Midway Management Team Meeting Role Play
Community Action Reinforcing Empowerment
There are links to relevant videos and documents on this page that provide more details about the development of the CARE Sustainability Model over time.
Community-Based Holistic Trauma Informed Social Work Practice with Veterans
A letter sent to the Governor of Arkansas in 2008 was the antecedent to development of the CARE model. The letter is in regard to the States possible response to returning services members and developing community structures to support service members and their families.
CARE Sustainable Community Transformation
Great universities serve to transform the environment around the institution. Various communities provide a locus of experiential learning and service-learning opportunities to be infused into the curriculum of most college majors. The community as classroom provides emersion into real life opportunities to engage in deliberate practice exercises. This video presented at the International Federation of Social Workers Conference in July of 2020 overviews the CARE sustainability community transformation model.
The presenter offers an example of engaging university departments in addressing social and economic concerns of a community across the street from the university. There is a demonstration about fusing various delivery methods and services within the CARE Sustainable Community Transformation framework.
The use of Allegory in experiential education
There are allegorical videos offered on this page. Oxford dictionary defines Allegory as “a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one.” I started using Allegorical stories in the classroom to allow students to set aside personal biases when exploring social justice, social and economic policy issues. Allegories can also be used with community groups. When working on a range of problems it is easier to step back and analyze various situations. After developing recommendations with the characters in the allegory, students are asked to apply their learning to events and policies that impact the city, state and nation. They are asked how they might apply their recommendation to real world concerns. The City of Midway is a good example of this concept. We enter into a space that is unfamiliar to us with people we do not know and from a distance we view how the community responds to a situation and attempts to reduce suicide in the region. The Allegory allows us to explore possible solutions to complex problems. The Elves and Fairies Allegories transport participants into unfamiliar territory. The second video demonstrates possible solutions to the Forest Virus that has killed numerous elves and fairies. The Allegory of the City of Airy was written in 1998 and appears to have foreshadowed the COVID-19 crisis.
Allegory of the City of Midway
This first video presents some ideas for implementing the CARE framework within a community to address Mental Health and Suicide Prevention concerns. This allegory involves building a community-wide suicide prevention and mental health program from a successful suicide prevention program for Veterans. Veterans joined in the planning and implementation efforts of the City of Midway and Promise County. In this video I demonstrate the development of a solution focused approach to the problems and examples of community co-building transformation through a number of Community Action Teams addressing various issues. I tried to involve a diverse group of residents coming together to focus on solving the issues. Solution focused work does not involve discussion of the past grievances individual citizens have. Instead, the focus is on the future and revisioning the future of the community.
The Association of Suicidology accepted our presentation of Assessment and Prevention Strategies for Suicidal Clients: Sustainable Micro, Mezzo, and Macro Services, that was offered on April 22, 2021 in Orlando, FL. The video shared here is part of our Continuing Education for Mental Health Professionals that was shared at the conference. The following is a 19 minute section of the longer video.
Two participation booklets
City of Midway In Box Journal for your project
City of Midway Management Team Meeting Role Play
ABC Consultants (Julia Buckey, J J Beggs, and George A Jacinto) gather to review the group’s findings and discuss implementation of the stages of the various community partner resources.
Life Span Community Suicide Prevention Safety Net
Life Span is an Australian Suicide Prevention Program developed by Black Dog Institute. Life Span has nine components that comprise a suicide safety net. In sustainable community transformation programs these are important elements that offer ongoing sustainable windows on viewing and reducing suicide and other problems that impact the neighborhood, community, town, city, region where the sustainable transformation takes place.
Allegory of The City of Airy
This is a Diversity simulation activity. The two-sided handout is presented first and the PowerPoint describing the classroom process follows. It is interesting that people are really able to fluidly consider the Health, Tax and Immigration issues faced by the Elves. After forming recommendations at the end of the simulation participants are asked to extrapolate from the allegory issues we face in this country at the present time. The link below has the City of Airy allegory and PowerPoint for the facilitator in conducting the simulation activity.
Supervision Summative Evaluation - City of Airy
This video is a follow up to the City of Airy allegory, and part of a Qualified Supervisor training that included a number of diversity issues as they relate to the Elves and Fairies perspectives on Gender, Power, Disability, Economics, and Traumatic Stress and Post Trauma recovery after the Forest Virus killed thousands of elves and fairies. This object lesson between the supervisor and supervisee demonstrates how the two groups were able to survive the virus and how social and economic inequities were addressed.