DETROIT COMMUNITY

Detroit Community

Detroit community Problem Solving

As professionals who work daily in the trenches of community collaboration, we see and hear a lot of rhetoric and experience much “lip service” paid to the notion of collaboration. We find that most groups and individuals coming together to address their community problems do not seem to grasp the full dimensions of the collaborative process or how to evaluate its effectiveness. We find the article “Broadening Participation in Community Problem Solving: a Multidisciplinary Model to Support Collaborative Practice and Research” and the Community Health Governance (CHG) model presented therein to be an extremely important step toward clarifying and defining collaborative effectiveness. This model can prove very useful to community residents and groups as they struggle to define their role and participation in community collaborations.

Those of us who work directly in and with communities have to be honest about what it is we are asking collaborators to take on. As in the CHG model, we urge collaborations to take on a process that engages people in identifying common issues, problems, and goals and mobilizes resources and develops, prioritizes, and implements strategies for reaching those goals. Engaging community members and groups in collaboration is not about inviting them to be foot soldiers for an already determined initiative that is for or about them. Neither is it about community groups simply collecting data, holding focus groups, mobilizing the community, or otherwise validating an externally driven initiative. It is no longer acceptable for “professionals” to determine the issues and think that they, because of their “expertise,” know how to fix them. If the people who are affected do not participate in and “own” the solutions to the problems, implementations will be half-hearted at best, probably misunderstood, and, more likely than not, fail.

True community engagement is about effectively ...