What is SCOPE’s Resident Community Changemakers Fellowship?
On Tuesday, SCOPE will host an information session regarding the Resident Community Changemakers fellowship, which will be starting up in January 2012. This is a nine-month fellowship for individuals who are living in Sarasota County and are interested in devoting themselves to resident-initiated, resident-led community change efforts beginning in their own neighborhood. SCOPE will provide fellows with ongoing reflective consultation, tools and resources, networking opportunities, stipends, and training/technical assistance as needed to support community development at the neighborhood scale.
SCOPE has a distinct Theory of Community Change that orients to residents as primary community builders. Why? In many ways, residents who are neighbors trump professionals (no matter how competent) when it comes to neighborhood-scale community building. Residents have personal investment in the success of their own place. They have a more intimate perspective on everyday life, and so are able to more exquisitely detect changes in the neighborhood, and meaningful changes at that. Power differentials are less likely among neighbors than between neighbors and and institutions. And community building by neighbors tends to be more natural than professionally-led community-building.
What then is SCOPE’s role in relation to community-building? As an institution (even as a community engagement institution), we see our role as one of “second investor.” We work to spot aspiring resident community builders throughout the county. Then we orient them to SCOPE’s Theory of Community Change - not to educate or indoctrinate, but rather to determine whether this Theory of Community Change resonates. SCOPE then teams up with residents who are aspiring community changemakers with compatible philosophies and, by following the lead of residents, partners in community change efforts that emanate from the neighborhood scale.
The primary resource that SCOPE offers to fellows is reflective consultation, in order to support the reflective capacities of resident community changemakers. Reflective consultation refers to individual and group sessions in which the fellow describes their latest community-building efforts and what has been going on in their neighborhood and community, and the SCOPE consultant actively listens and asks questions to clarify what has been learned through the experience, and how this can inform future neighbor-led efforts. When a person is able to reflect real-time on the decisions they are making and the actions they are taking, in personal, family, neighborhood, and broader community context, they are able to be more effective as change agents. When indicated, SCOPE is able and willing to provide education, training, and technical assistance with regard to methods and techniques of community-building and community changemaking. However, the emphasis on reflective consultation, rather than education/training/technical assistance, is what makes the SCOPE fellowship unique.
We anticipate that there are many aspiring resident community changemakers living in Sarasota County. Are you one of them? Do you know of others? If so, especially as we are in the “talent-scouting” phase, we hope you’ll let us know!
Please contact Dr. Allison Pinto at apinto@scopexcel.org or 941.365.8751.
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Comments
Thanks for your feedback, Joan. Sorry the hyperlink in the blog post was not active to take readers to the earlier post that included details regarding the upcoming information session. We have edited the post to ensure the hyperlink is working. We are still in the process of figuring out how to ensure that our various forms of virtual communication and social media - email, blog, facebook and twitter - are well synchronized. Please keep the feedback coming to help us continually get better. The information session on Tuesday will be the first, but not the only session. We will use participants’ input and feedback to inform future sessions. There is no grant associated with this fellowship, and no one has yet been identified or selected as a 2012 fellow. If you are interested, we hope you’ll come to an info session or contact me (Allison Pinto) at SCOPE. We are looking forward to working together with other residents of Sarasota County as fellow aspiring community changemakers.
I so wish this wonderful news had been posted before the Friday night before a Tuesday event. Is there anyone to even read this, email or phone calls over weekend? Most of the likely candidates don’t have an empty week coming up; we need a longer heads up. Even if we did have time on Tuesday, how could we attend as time and place is not listed? Every thing about the way this info and non info was/wasn’t shared contradicts the wonderful ideas/philosophy that you are promoting. A cynic might think this is all talk and the grant process is an inside job.