The Vital Role of Social Workers in Community Partnerships: The Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Youth

The account of The Alliance for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (GLBTQ) Youth formation offers a model for developing com- munity-based partnerships. Based in a major urban area, this university-community collaboration was spearheaded by social workers who were responsible for its original conceptualization, for generating community support, and for eventual staffing, administration, direct service provision, and program evaluation design. This article presents the strategic development and evolution of this community- based service partnership, highlighting the roles of schools of social work, academics, and social work students in concert with community funders, practitioners and youth, in responding to the needs of a vulnerable population

Legitimacy as the Basis for Organizational Development of Voluntary Organizations

In the analysis of voluntary organizations, legitimacy and legitimation are useful concepts because they bring to light the process through which organizational entities justify their right to exist and their actions within a particular normative context (Maurer 1971; Meyer and Scott 1983; Beetham 2013). Theories of legitimacy underscore the moral basis of organizational power as grounded in the relationship between organizations and different kinds of audiences. In this chapter, we look at how those concepts and theories relate to the study of voluntary organizations. Those theories not only help us understand how voluntary organizations establish themselves, strengthen their position and survive over time despite very limited material resources of their own, but also how different organizational claims can directly impact communities, either by publicly projecting particular conceptions of community or by articulating specific interests and needs on behalf of its members In our review of the literature on organizational legitimacy, we focus on three main aspects of legitimacy: conceptualization of the term in organizational sociology, political sociology and studies of non-profit organizations; the constraining role of institutionalized normative contexts and competing audiences in the legitimation processes; the agentic role of organizations within both institutional and strategic contexts

Students Implement the Affordable Care Act: A Model for Undergraduate Teaching and Research in Community Health and Sociology

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to observe and experience first-hand changing social policies and their impacts for individuals and communities. This article overviews an action research and teaching project developed at an undergraduate liberal arts university and focused on providing ACA enrollment assistance as a way to support student engagement with community health. The project was oriented around education, enrollment and evaluation activities in the community, and students and faculty together reflected on and analyzed the experiences that came from the research and outreach project. Student learning centered around applying concepts of diversity and political agency to health policy and community health systems. Students reported and faculty observed an unexpected empowerment for students who were able to use their university-learned critical thinking skills to explain complex systems to a wide range of audiences. In addition, because the project was centered at a university with no health professions programs, the project provided students interested in community and public health with the opportunity to reflect on how health and access to health care is conditioned by social context. The structure and pedagogical approaches and implications of the action research and teaching project is presented here as a case study for how to engage undergraduates in questions of community and public health through the lens of health policy and community engagement