The Witness to Witness Program: Helping the Helpers in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Witness to Witness Program (W2W), based on Weingarten’s witnessing model (2000, 2003, 2004), began in July 2018 and originally was established to support healthcare workers and attorneys (our partners) who were experiencing empathic distress working with people involved in various stages of the detention process. The W2W program evolved to offer four primary components: clinician listening sessions geared to deep understanding of the person’s story of their work and its challenges; an inventory of the person’s current internal and external resources both in the present and in the past; help with removal of barriers to those resources; and development of a personal toolkit to handle stress. Additional services available to partners and their organizations included psycho-educational webinars, facilitated peer support groups, and organizational consultations to foster trauma-sensitive and resilience-hardy work environments. In March, after lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic, W2W pivoted to focus on handouts and webinars addressing how to cope with distress and moral injury, maintaining resilience, coping with grief, and dealing with multiple losses caused by the pandemic. Disaster sparked collaboration and innovation. A train the trainer model was developed to reach more community health workers providing services to the Latinx community dealing with losses similar to those experienced by the clients they serve. W2W continues to create virtual communities of support. In doing so we practice doing reasonable hope together (Weingarten, Family Process, 2010, 49, 5).     

Neighborhood Violent Crime and Academic Performance: A Geospatial Analysis

Decades of empirical work have confirmed that experiences with violence are associated with a variety of adverse behavioral and mental health as well as academic outcomes for children and adolescents. Yet this research largely has relied on indirect measures of exposure. In this study, we apply geospatial analysis to examine the relation between neighborhood violent crime (via police reports) and academic performance (via school-level standardized test proficiency rates). Findings suggest that greater numbers of crimes proximal to school buildings relate to lower levels of academic performance. These results persisted even when controlling economic disadvantage in the student body. Implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Empowering Community Settings: Agents of Individual Development, Community Betterment, and Positive Social Change

The pathways and processes through which empowering community settings influence their members, the surrounding community and the larger society are examined. To generate the proposed pathways and processes, a broad range of studies of community settings were reviewed, in the domains of adult well-being, positive youth development, locality development, and social change. A set of organizational characteristics and associated processes leading to member empowerment across domains were identified, as well as three pathways through which empowering settings in each domain contribute to community betterment and positive social change. The paper concludes with an examination of the ways that community psychology and allied disciplines can help increase the number and range of empowering settings, and enhance the community and societal impact of existing ones. Based on SCRA Distinguished Contribution to Theory and Research Award Address: Pasadena, CA, June 8, 2007.     

Making the Connections: Community Capacity for Tobacco Control in an Urban African American Community

Developing community capacity to improve health is a cornerstone of community-based public health. The concept of community capacity reflects numerous facets and dimensions of community life and can have different meanings in different contexts. This paper explores how members of one community identify and interpret key aspects of their community’s capacity to limit the availability and use of tobacco products. Particular attention is given to examining the interrelationship between various dimensions of community capacity in order to better understand the processes by which communities are able to mobilize for social change. The study is based on qualitative analysis of 19 in-depth interviews with key informants representing a variety of community sectors in Harlem, New York City. Findings indicate that the community is viewed as rich in human and social resources. A strong sense of community identity and connectedness underlies this reserve and serves as a catalyst for action. At the time this study was conducted, all authors were at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.     

Adaptive Coping Reduces the Impact of Community Violence Exposure on Violent Behavior among African American and Latino Male Adolescents

This study examined whether coping moderated the impact of community violence exposure (CVE) on violent behavior among 285 urban African American and Latino adolescent males assessed annually across 5 years. Composites indicating overall CVE (having knowledge of others’ victimization, witnessing violence, direct victimization) and approach to coping with CVE were created by averaging across years 1–3 (Time 1; mean ages 14–16). Adolescents classified as coping effectively tended to respond to CVE in beneficial ways (e.g., developing long-term solutions, engaging in positive reappraisal). Violent behavior was examined across years 1–3 (Time 1) and years 4–5 (Time 2; mean ages 18–19). CVE was longitudinally associated with greater violent behavior, adjusting for Time 1 levels of violent behavior. This association was significant only among adolescents with less effective coping strategies. Interventions targeting the enhancement of coping skills may be an effective method of reducing the impact of CVE on adolescent violent behavior. Sonya S. Brady is now an Assistant Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota (1300 South Second Street, Suite 300, Minneapolis, MN 55454-1015, USA; Tel.: +1-612-6241818; Fax: +1-612-6240315.     

Bridging Science to Practice: Achieving Prevention Program Implementation Fidelity in the Community Youth Development Study

This paper describes the development, application, and results of an implementation monitoring component of the Communities That Care (CTC) prevention framework used in the Community Youth Development Study (CYDS) to ensure high-fidelity prevention program implementation. This system was created based on research that community-based implementation of evidence-based prevention programs often includes adaptations in program design, content, or manner of delivery (Gottfredson and Gottfredson, Journal of research in crime and delinquency, 39, 3-35, 2002; Hallfors and Godette, Health Education Research, 17, 461-470, 2002; Wandersman and Florin, American Psychologist, 58, 441-448, 2003). A lack of fidelity to the implementation standards delineated by program designers is one indicator of a gap between prevention science and practice which can lessen the likelihood that communities will realize the positive participant effects demonstrated in research trials. By using the CTC model to select and monitor the quality of prevention activities, the 12 CYDS communities replicated 13 prevention programs with high rates of adherence to the programs' core components and in accordance with dosage requirements regarding the number, length, and frequency of sessions. This success indicates the potential of the CTC program implementation monitoring system to enhance community Prevention Delivery Systems (Wandersman et al. American Journal of Community Psychology, this issue) and improve the likelihood of desired participant changes.     

Selfhood and Fiduciary Community: A Smithian Reading of Tu Weiming’s Confucian Humanism

Tu Weiming, as a leading spokesman for contemporary New Confucianism, has been reinterpreting the Confucian tradition in the face of the challenges of modernity. Tu takes selfhood as his starting point, emphasizing the importance of cultivating the human mind-and-heart as a deepening and broadening process to realize the anthropocosmic dao. He highlights the concept of a “fiduciary community” and advocates that, because of it, Confucianism remains a dynamic “inclusive humanism.” Tu’s mode of thinking tallies well with Wilfred C. Smith’s vision of religion, specifically the latter’s exposition of faith as a universal human quality and proposal of “corporate critical self-consciousness.” This article details the theories of both scholars, highlights their similarities, and contrasts their differences. It argues that Smith’s world theology provides a heuristic framework through which one understands how Tu has advanced his Confucian humanism from a Chinese philosophical or cultural tradition to the midst of world religions.     

Promotion of Civic Engagement with the Family Leadership Training Institute

In this efficacy study, both quantitative and qualitative data were used to gauge the effects of the Family Leadership Training Institute (FLTI) on civic knowledge and empowerment, civic engagement, and community health. The sample of 847 FLTI participants and 166 comparison adults completed pretest and posttest surveys. Medium to very large short‐term effects were observed in civic literacy, empowerment, and engagement. Results mapping interviews were conducted with a stratified random sample of FLTI graduates (n = 52) to assess long‐term (M = 2.73 years) program impact. Most FLTI graduates (86%) sustained meaningful, sometimes transformative, levels of civic engagement after program completion. This engagement involved multiple forms of leadership, most often advocacy, program implementation, and media campaigns; 63% of graduates directed at least some of their activities to marginalized populations. Content analyses of graduates' civic (capstone) projects and results mapping story maps indicated that 81–90% of community activities aligned with public health priorities. Thus, one promising means to promote community health is to empower families to develop leadership skills, become engaged in civic life, and forge connections with diverse constituents.