The Community Action Program Works to Improve Mental Health at the District Level: The Evaluation of the Community Action Program in Districts of Iran

Objective: Three categories of interventions are considered for reducing the prevalence of mental disorders in Iran: mental health promotion, increasing mental health and social service utilization and controlling mental health risk factors. In this regard, we designed a community action program in a national plan to provide comprehensive social and mental health services (SERAJ) that were implemented as a pilot in three districts of Iran: Bardasir, Oslo, and Quchan. In this study, we have reviewed the results of this pilot project. Method: This study was conducted based on the collaborative evaluation model; first, the program was described and the evaluation indicators of each component of the program were determined. Stakeholders were determined; also, data were collected through literature review, semi-structured interview, and focused group discussion and were analyzed by thematic analysis methods. Results: The community action program consists of four components: A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the departments of the districts, People’s Participation House (PPH), Self-reliance Unit (SRU), and actions taken for stigma reduction. A total of 48% of the actions set out in the three MoU of three districts have been executed. The PPH was formed in all three districts. A total of 816 social referrals were admitted to SRU for which a self-reliance process has been initiated. Moreover, 47% of referrals have received services and at least 10 messages for stigma reduction and promoting mental disorders have been sent from different sources at the district level. Conclusion: Strengthening vertical cooperation between the national and provincial levels is essential for the full implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and self-reliance processes. Referring individuals for receiving social support with collaboration between the primary and secondary programs reported to be successful, but feedback to the primary and secondary levels which provides basic and specialized services, is not transparent. Therefore, we suggest an electronic system as an option to solve this problem. The careful selection of representatives of the people's network and empowerment of PPH and directors of the district on community action skills are essential. The experiences of the governors and chairs of health networks of the three districts should be presented at a national conference.

School Nurse Poverty Education: Why It Is Important to Your Practice

School nurses are seeing increased numbers of children who are living in poverty. The Missouri Community Action Program Poverty Simulation was presented to school nurses to increase their awareness of what it might be like to live in poverty and the related healthcare barriers. Participants shared their reactions and knowledge gained in the simulation in a postparticipation survey with the simulation facilitators. Some participants shared practice changes that they made as a result of their participation in the simulation, which included use of additional referral resources, being less judgmental, and increased empathy.

Reassessing the History of the Community Action Program, 1963–1967

This article reconsiders the history of the Community Action Program (CAP). I argue that the CAP is best understood as a bold attempt at administrative experimentation and reform. Using original archival materials, I show that policymakers involved the CAP’s design outlined three models of community action: coordination, collaboration, and mobilization, which communities drew upon when implementing the program. Drawing upon an original dataset of ninety-eight community action agencies (CAAs), this article provides a synthetic assessment of the CAP’s implementation. I show that while the 1967 Green Amendment curtailed the CAP’s experimental and participatory ethos, most CAAs operated relatively harmoniously with local governments and social welfare groups to fight poverty. By looking beyond the dramatic clashes between CAAs and local governments and focusing on the multiple ways in which CAAs seized upon the CAP’s experimental nature, this article provides a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the CAP’s historical legacy.

Introduction

Focusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother.

Writing Urban Crisis after Moynihan

This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.

Conclusion

The Conclusion sums up ongoing anxieties about lower-class cultural difference in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, exploring the notion that the rural white working class inhabits an alternative culture hostile toward expert knowledge. The Conclusion develops this notion through a reading of Carolyn Chute’s The School on Heart’s Content Road and Treat Us like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves. In these fictions, Chute imagines an educational co-op that creates working-class experts, bypassing the division between professionals and lower-class clients that marked the Community Action Program. Chute embodies this notion of working-class expertise in the novels’ form; she presents them as alternative histories, accessible to nonexpert reading practices. However, the novels replicate the War on Poverty–era notion of class culture, which cannot be eradicated without exterminating the tribal consciousness of working-class Maine.