DSNI & Holding Ground

After reading about the DSNI and watching the Holding Ground video I have been able to apply more concept and meaning to community projects. The Holding Ground video explains from the beginning about how a community that was at it bests, slowly fell down to its worst. And in between the best and worst times it explores what the community and its residents had to do in order to improve their living situations. The sacrifices that the community as a whole had to make in order to restore the Roxbury area are outstanding accomplishments. The population in this community included immigrants of Spanish, Cape Verdian, and Portuguese families which were the ones being affected most by the falling of this community. They moved here to better their lives and continued to struggle in poverty. Just because these people are struggling doesn't mean that they should be living in the filth that their neighborhoods were made of. Their neighborhoods and blocks were filled with dumbing of others garbage which made the living unbearable and unhealthy. 

It was time to make a change and clean up the neighborhood and make it a livable place like it use to be. Fraser and Kick highlight the importance of growing poverty in Understanding Community Building in Urban America by identifying three forms of organizing community. "Persistent urban poverty is not new on the American landscape. Indeed, Fisher (1996) posits that issues of poverty have motivated three primary forms of organizing neighborhood community in the United States since the 1800s. As a necessary preliminary to subsequent discussion we summarize these forms next, respectively labeling them as “social work,” “neighborhood main- tenance,” and “political activist” approaches." As social workers we learn to be activist and advocates for our community and for those of less fortunate. We support oppressed populations and take something little and make it bigger and better. 

The planning and rebuilding of a community is much easier said than done. Throughout the video it showed that in order to be successful there needed to be many supporters financially, physically, and emotionally. Without working together as the government and the community residents and representatives then the ideas and solutions wouldn't have been as successful. They learned that you can't go into a community and tell them what needs to be changed and how its going to happen. You must first get the opinions and ideas from the community itself to devise a plan of action that best suites the needs. This quote from Myles Horton explains a good point of view on working with a community.

"To me, it's essential that you start where people are. But ifyou're going to start where they are and they don't change, then there's no point in starting because you're not going anywhere. So while I insist on starting where people are, that's the only place they could start I can start somewhere else. I can start where I am, but they've got to start where they are. But then if you don't have some vision of what ought to be or what they can become, then you have no way of contributing anything to the process. Your theory determines what you want to do in terms of helping people grow. So it's extremely important that you have a theory about it that helps you decide."(Horton & Freire)

In the Hardina article Linking Citizen Participation to Empowerment Practice: A Historical Overview there is a passage that I think is great to apply to community working. "The primary purpose of community organized practices is to acquire power for members of oppressed groups. They define empowerment in individuals as 'confidence, control, decision, authority, influence, autonomy and self trust.'." This is a great explanation of how giving power to the community members themselves will able the biggest change to happen. Once again it is supported that the importance of community involvement in planning and action makes the largest impact and progression in change. In doing so builds trust and relationships as well as bringing ideas together.

The DSNI organization was created to help bring a community together and make change. To this day those part of this organization are working together to continue to make the lives of those who need it better. They are striving to sustain community development and to continue progression.