Cultural Humility, Critical Consciousness and Empowerment in Strengthening Community
How do we help build or strengthen community?
Typically, we discuss strengthening in terms of empowering community organizations or individuals. However, there is a major pitfall many well-meaning individuals fall into as they approach a community. That is not being aware of our own preconceived notions about what community is, what they want from us and what kind of power they already have. Or in other words, we risk coming into a community with the self-righteous perspective that we are the experts, that we have the power and we are benevolently providing them access to our power. This is inherently racist and classist and is indeed one of the many roots of the system of oppression that originally worked to disempowered the community initially. This is a hierarchical paternalistic approach to community health that does little to strengthen community and continues to undermine community collective efficacy
We as practitioners and students must at least understand two important concepts in order to partner with community to build power. The first of these is cultural humility; a necessary step that must be taken before approaching community. Critical self-reflection is the first step in the process of learning cultural humility. This requires us as community outsiders, public health experts etc.. to step back from our intentions and look back at our motivations, position and privilege in society. We must be in tune with what preconceptions and biases that we bring to a community about ourselves and the community. In short, we need to make sure that community partners remain the driving force of any building and not what we as outsiders believe to be best for them. Then we can begin to consider what we mean to accomplish through the process of empowerment, the second concept.
Empowerment theory and the related concept of critical consciousness are built on the belief that communities and individuals have the power they need, the inner strength, talent, intellect and resources, but through a systematic process of impoverishment and oppression lack reasonable guidance, opportunity and examples to conceive of their power. Empowerment is achieved through the process, strategies, policies and resources that guide or facilitate the process of learning to use voice and agency by individuals, organizations and communities to effectively decide their own fate and destiny. An Empowered community has organizations that work to empower and organizations that act on their empowerment. This is community-driven and prioritized. Where a community is in the process of developing empowered and empowering entities and individuals will determine the role of any outside organizations as partners in this process. In other words, responding to where the community is and what they want.
In other words- The first steps for strengthening community is to accept and confront our privilege and position, our bias and preconceptions and then change our focus from experts to facilitators of agency.
If your interested — here are some good resources on these concepts and a recently published paper, in which we describe a process used to build community collaborations
Introduction videos on concepts
Publications-