1. Citizen Participation and Empowerment

2. Chapter Overview Definition of Citizen Participation & Empowerment
Description of Citizen activists study
Proposition of a sense of community model
Research and conceptual issues

3. Citizen Participation
a process in which individuals take part in decision making in the institutions, programs, and environments that affect them (K. Heller et al., 1984, p. 339)
Does this sound like your group experience???
Institutions, programs and environments includes work places, health settings such as hospitals or mental health centers, schools etc

4. What Citizen Participation IS NOT:
Volunteering (ie: field trip, nursing home)
Social support or mutual help for individual adjustment (ie: alcoholics anonymous)
Voting
Holding the power to control all decisions
Static characteristic of persons or of organizations

5. What Citizen Participation IS:
A process
Member input for group decisions
Occurs in a diversity of forums
Serving on a community coalition to address prevention of ______?
Means (technique) or end (value) (ie: mandatory community advisory committees)
Competes with economic efficiency

6. Empowerment & Community Psychology
a process, a mechanism by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their affairs (Rappaport, 1987)

7. Cornell Empowerment Group
an intentional, ongoing process centered in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection,, caring, and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of resources gain greater access to and control over those resources (cited in D.D. Perkings & Zimmerman, 1995, p. 570, and by Rappaport, 1999).

8. Citizen Participation vs. Empowerment
Participation is a behavior involving actively engaging in decision making within a group, or organization, or environment
Empowerment is a broader process that includes variables that may lead to citizen participation, accompany it, or result from it

9. Qualities of Empowerment
Multilevel Construct
Bottom-Up Perspective: (ie: grassroots organizations)
Contextual Differences
Process of Empowerment: “not a personality trait”
Collective Context: not a solitary process

10. Contributions and Limitations
The process of empowerment may promote ends such as justice, equality, respect for diversity, or sense of community
May be used to promote self-advancement without regard for one’s community or for others

11. Stages, Outcome, & Themes of Psychological Empowerment (Kieffer, 1984)
Era of Entry: strong sense of community threatened direct provocation to the self-interest or wider community
Era of Advancement: role model,grassroots org., critical awareness
Era of Incorporation: integrating learning and experiences into a changing sense of personal identity
Era of Commitment: full integration into one’s own life and personal identity

12. Outcome of Developmental Stages
Participatory competence
Involves 3 Factors
Self perception of having skills for citizen participation
Critical understanding of the sociopolitical environment
Cultivation of individual and collective resources for community action

13. Citizen Participation
Sense of Community
Citizen Participation
Empowerment

14. Elements of Psychological Empowerment
Involves cognition, behavioral skills or competence & motivation, commitment to values etc.
Develops through the interaction of personality factors and social experiences
Critical Awareness
Participatory Competence
Sustaining Participation and Empowerment

15. Empowering Community Settings
Empowering Settings and Personal Development
Group-Based, Strengths-Based Belief System
Opportunity Role Structures
Peer Social Support Systems
Shared, Inspiring Leadership
Overall goal is to strengthen the internal sense of community within the setting

16. Empowering Settings and Community Change
Conflict and “Coempowerment” within an organization
Activating resources
Appreciating interdependencies
Inclusive decision making
Boundary spanning
Benefits of costs participation

17. Qualities of Empowering Community Settings
Group-based, strengths-based belief system
Opportunity role structures, participatory niches
Peer social support systems
Shared, inspiring leadership
Coempowerment
Coempowerment
Activating resources
Appreciating interdependencies
Inclusive decision making (through citizen participation)
Boundary spanning
Maximizing benefits, minimizing costs of participation
Overarching theme: Sense of community within setting

18. Benefits and Costs of Participation
Dilemmas in Creating empowering Settings
Challenges of “Success”
Inequalities of Resources
Top-Down Empowerment

19. Figure 12.1 ENVIRONMENT Provocation Citizen Participation Sense of
Empowering
Setting
Provocation
Citizen
Participation
Sense of
Community
Psychological
Empowerment
INDIVIDUAL