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Community capacity
building at forefront of psychologist’s work
(August/September
2007 Issue)
The population of the United States is in constant flux, as it
has been for much of its history. Walk through any urban high school
to hear English mixed with everything from Spanish, Portuguese and
Russian to Laotian, Thai, and Mandarin.
With the influx of immigrants, cities often have a difficult time
keeping up with social services that meet the needs of their varied
populations.
That is where Linda Silka, Ph.D., a professor in the Department
of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of
Massachusetts Lowell, comes in. As the director of the university's
Center for Family, Work and Community (CFWC) and co-director of
the school's Community Outreach Partnership Center, Silka works
with community leaders and social services to do program evaluations,
leadership development, needs assessment and more.
Through the CFWC, Silka has also taken part in the Collaborative
Initiative for Research Ethics in Environmental Health (CIREEH),
an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Syracuse University,
UMass and three other schools, to offer courses to research professionals
and community activists that focus on the ethical issues of doing
community research.
Silka has been asked to speak at this month's American Psychological
Association convention in San Francisco on "Addressing Immigration:
Psychological Research and Social Engagement." She spoke with New
England Psychologist's Catherine Robertson-Souter about her
work and the need for more involvement by the profession in community
capacity building.
Q: First, tell us about "community capacity building." What
does the term mean and how does one put it into practice?
A: Community capacity building focuses on assisting community
members to learn skills they would like to develop.
One example might be grant writing. We have been approached by
community organizations such as a Cambodian youth-serving organization
that would like to learn grant writing skills so that they can be
successful at developing programs to keep youth in school.
Another example: in New England we have high rates of pediatric
asthma. Youth working with the Center for Family, Work and Community
developed a cable television show for Cambodian parents that included
information on steps they could take to address the problem. Another
example: youth in Lowell were concerned about the lack of public
transportation to help them get to jobs, movies, malls, etc. We
conducted a summer project to gather data on youth transportation
issues. A goal of the project was to build youth capacity to do
research and create a policy report.
Q: Tell us about your work with the Center for Family, Work
and Community.
A: I direct the UML Center for Family, Work, and Community
(CFWC). We work to bring community and university people together
to solve problems. In a way, the CFWC serves a bit like a front
door of the university. We help people from outside the university
find people they could work with at the university.
Last year, we were contacted by the Lowell Police Department.
They have been very active in trying to address youth gang problems.
They asked us to work with them to facilitate meetings between high
school students who might join gangs and police officers. So, we
facilitated these meetings but then also looked for ways that the
university might become more involved in bringing resources to this
problem.
Q: You have also been involved in the Collaborative Initiative
for Research Ethics and Environmental Health, teaching workshops
and hosting conferences on how researchers and community organizations
can work together.
A: We (CFWC) were part of an initiative with leaders from Syracuse
U, Brown U, and University of North Carolina. All of us had worked
on community-university partnership research on environmental health.
In Lowell, for example, much of this work focused on urban environmental
health problems, particularly those impacting immigrant and refugee
groups that move to the highly urbanized Northeast from countries
that are very rural. In a place such as Lowell, they encounter lead
paint, contaminated rivers and ponds (that can lead to heavy metals
in fish that are caught for consumption) and contaminated land on
which people might want to garden. Often researchers will want to
study the impact of the contamination. The difficulty for community
residents is that too often they are studied but don't have an equal
say in the process of the research design, implementation and application.
This project focused on looking at how to carry out ethical work
in this community-based research context.
Q: You will be speaking at the APA convention on "Addressing
Immigration: Psychological Research and Social Engagement."
A: My goal is to reach out to other psychologists about the
opportunities of building partnerships with immigrant and refugee
communities. Leaders in many other disciplines have made themselves
available to immigrant and refugee communities to assist with all
of the challenges that go along with suddenly being thrust into
a new culture. So many of the challenges have psychological (interpersonal
and intra-personal) implications that it is crucial that as a discipline,
we become much more involved in working with newcomer communities.
I was just in Australia and talked there with leaders at the University
of Western Sydney. This area of Australia is rapidly becoming very
diverse and they are struggling with how their universities can
be effective in helping families meet the challenges they face.
I met with a new Ph.D. in psychology in Australia who is focusing
her efforts on understanding how the many psychological scales we
use can be better attuned to the needs and challenges faced by refugees
and immigrants.
Q: How did you get involved with this work?
A: My Ph.D. is a basic research Ph.D. in social psychology
and most of my early work was on social cognition. The world changed
around me! Massachusetts, particularly Boston and the Merrimack
Valley, were becoming much more diverse and many challenges were
emerging. My university needed someone who would work with local
groups to find ways to solve problems together. There is so much
interesting research being done by psychologists that is not being
used. This was an opportunity to apply the research but also to
reframe research questions based on the complex problems that were
emerging. Now I love the challenge of figuring out how different
disciplines can come together to tackle emerging issues.
Q: Why is there a need for this work?
A: A couple of examples of the need: Waterville, Maine, has
a growing Somali population and there is a need there for people
who are interested in schools, neighborhoods, family dynamics, elders
- all of the ways that cultures and families can differ. Lawrence,
Mass., has a growing Latino population. There are now programs in
Lawrence that are focused on identifying best practices in family
strengthening that work for different cultures. In Lowell, there
are programs looking at the needs of Cambodian elders. Diabetes
is rapidly growing in this community and there is the need for people
from a broad range of disciplines to be able to work with the Cambodian
community to address the health problems that are emerging.
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