Rebuilding Communities

As modern societies become increasingly individualistic, this fascinating book examines how we can maintain and revive local communities and community life. It demonstrates how the major developments and processes of our time, notably globalization, post-industrialism and de-traditionalization, contribute to this individualism to the detriment of community life. The author examines how community is a necessary and important component of human life and discusses possible ways in which to arrest its decline. In this regard, strategies geared to fostering trust and social capital are outlined as the basis for reinvigorating community life. The volume provides a coherent and distinct analysis of community as well as offering concrete policy prescriptions to counter the excessive individualism of our times. In both the nature and scope of its analysis, it offers a unique contribution to an extremely important issue in the contemporary period, one that increasingly preoccupies politicians, academics and ordinary citizens.

Rebuilding Communities: Challenges for Group Work is a collection of research and information presented at the 18th Annual Symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups. Social workers, students, educators, and practitioners will examine how group work can improve multicultural relations within the community. Through your use of the valuable suggestions in this book, you will discover new ways to help the poor in your community help themselves, while giving them a sense of power and self-esteem to help them battle racism, sexism, and shrinking economic opportunities. Through Rebuilding Communities, you will also discover a formula for global group work that will help you make a difference by applying your hometown skills to the global community. This valuable book discusses the need for you to combine energy with humility, offer assistance with the ability to listen, to intervene when necessary, and to comprehend diversity for successful and beneficial group programs. This informative guide brings to light the skills and values needed for effective group work and how combining knowledge-base and practice-base will assist you in making a positive impact on your community. With this important book, you will find a rich source of current thinking about group work practice in relation to women, violence, health problems, child welfare, and other areas, as well as group work theory to help you find the best way to help the various people of your community. Rebuilding Communities will provide you with specific ways to improve your group work skills and positively affect the individuals in your community, such as: learning that your role of caring and advocacy as a group worker must be a complete and lifelong commitment and that you must be prepared to use your skills throughout your everyday life to make a difference using the World Wide Web to form groups whose members can support one another through the anger, joy, pain, and challenges of life learning how group work can help calm the stormy transitions that adolescent immigrants face by helping them relate to other children who are in similar circumstances examining how parents of pediatric urology patients find solace through groups where they can address such sensitive issues as the future of sexual functioning and fertility for their children discovering how marathon group sessions in South Africa are helping to provide basic services to the disadvantaged with programs to facilitate interracial contact and understanding among women and programs for adolescents boys in foster care Rebuilding Communities offers you a deeper understanding of the total positive effect that group work can have on various sectors of your community to help you provide better services to those in need. This unique book focuses your attention on the importance of group work to community development and even provides you with a glimpse into the future of group work. With Rebuilding Communities you will discover a multifaceted approach to solving problems that communities face to help you choose the best options for your own community and give the best possible services to the people you assist.

This book presents a collection of double-blind peer reviewed papers under the scope of sustainable and resilient approaches for rebuilding displaced and host communities. Forced displacement is a major development challenge, not only a humanitarian concern. A surge in violent conflict, as well as increasing levels of disaster risk and environmental degradation driven by climate change, has forced people to leave or flee their homes – both internally displaced as well as refugees. The rate of forced displacement befalling in different countries all over the world today is phenomenal, with an increasingly higher rate of the population being affected on daily basis than ever. These displacement situations are becoming increasingly protracted, many lasting over 5 years. Therefore, there is a need to develop more sustainable and resilient approaches to rebuild these displaced communities ensuring the long-term satisfaction of communities and enhancing the social cohesion between the displaced and host communities. Accordingly, chapters are arranged around five main themes of rebuilding communities after displacement. Response management for displaced communities The Built environment in resettlement planning Governance of displacement Socio-Economic interventions for sustainable resettlement

Rebuilding Communities the Public Trust Way highlights cases of community foundation assistance to Community Development Corporations (CDCs) during the final two decades of the twentieth century in Cleveland, Ohio; Florida; and New Orleans, Louisiana. Author Jeffrey S. Lowe describes the influence of these three community foundations on CDC capacity to engage in activities that facilitate the revitalization of urban communities and provides recommendations for other community foundations and policymakers seeking to work with CDCs. This is an essential read for persons involved in the fields of philanthropy and nonprofit organizations and scholars of community development, urban history, and social policy.

Resettlement is a global phenomenon once again at the forefront of political debate in Newfoundland and Labrador. This collection, edited by political scientist Isabelle Côté and geographer Yolande Pottie-Sherman, presents an assembly of interdisciplinary voices situating Newfoundland and Labrador resettlement (past, present, and future) in conversation with relocation debates in other places such Quebec and Northern Canada, Greenland, and Ireland. Contributors consider common themes of contemporary resettlement programs including resistance, collective-decision-making, power, place, and identity. Newfoundland Studies scholars have underscored the significance of Smallwood-era resettlement programs (1954-1977), but have not yet adequately addressed the second, ongoing phase of resettlement (1977-present), carried out at the request of communities and implemented to mitigate the fiscal mismatch between shrinking populations and infrastructure costs. In these pages, scholars examine a process that begins before and continues long after communities or individuals move, and places the Newfoundland and Labrador experience in conversation with other global contemporary resettlement projects.

This volume focuses on the status of the elderly and the disabled after disasters globally as well as the challenges of post-earthquake rebuilding in Haiti. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has estimated that between 1987 and 2007, about 26 million older people were affected each year by natural disasters alone and that this figure could more than double by 2050 due to the rapidly changing demographics of ageing. People with disabilities (physical, medical, sensory or cognitive) are equally at risk of utter neglect during and after disasters. The Australian Agency for International Development estimates that 650 million people across the world have a disability and about 80 per cent of them live in developing countries. Similarly, before the January 2010 earthquake, Haiti was a “country with tremendous development needs and numerous impediments to development,” according to Congresswoman Maxine Waters when introducing a Resolution in the US House of Representatives to cancel Haiti’s debts in March 2007. These impediments included an overwhelming burden of international debt; lack of personal and community assets; and, very little or no internal and external capacities, all of which have been exacerbated by the aftermath of the earthquake. It was against this background that the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at the University of Massachusetts Boston organized two international Conferences in 2010 – in April, on Rebuilding Sustainable Communities in Haiti in the wake of the January Earthquake; and, in July, on Rebuilding Sustainable Communities with the Elderly and Disabled People after Disasters. This edited book consists of selected papers that were presented at these academic events. The topics include Disaster Experiences of the Elderly and the Disabled in Nigeria; The Vulnerability of Elderly People in the Aftermath of Earthquakes in Iran; Methods for Assessing and Developing Understanding of Resiliency in Communities; The Tuareg’s traditional Shelter for Disaster Mitigation and Reconstruction in Libya; and, People with Disabilities in Haiti Before and After the 2010 Earthquake.

In this book, Mary Hoffschwelle shines a much-needed light on the efforts of rural reformers. She focuses on Tennessee because its varied geography and the large number of rural reform programs it hosted make it a particularly rich subject for study. Also, the state typified the burdens of poverty and racial division that characterized the South as a whole, and, as the author shows, such problems attracted considerable attention from reformers.