Community-Based Organizing:<\/p>\n
Conceptual frameworks applicable to the Santa Ana region and the niche that Padres Unidos serves include works from Ella Baker, Saul Alinsky, Christopher Emdin, and Paulo Freire.\u00a0 In the works of Baker and Alinsky, themes focused on grassroots organizing emerge to meditate on and guide how communities can move towards change together.\u00a0 Together, Padres Unidos employs these frameworks to construct and adapt programming to serve the needs of Santa Ana, including higher rates of incarceration, a high number of students learning English, a high density of immigrant families, and increased rates of poverty.\u00a0 Ella Baker empowered and forwarded the idea of \u201cparticipatory democracy\u201d in the 1960s, focusing distinctly on garnering support from the community as a whole, rather than enacting change independently or as part of a small, inaccessible group.\u00a0 Built upon the \u201ct<\/span>hree themes of participatory democracy\u2014 grassroots involvement by people in the decisions that affect their lives; the minimization of hierarchy and professionalization in organizations working for social change; and direct action on the sources of injustice (Bobo, 2004, pp. 82),\u201d Baker\u2019s philosophy centered on community investment and involvement, intended to work directly with citizens and those the program intended to serve, similar to how Padres Unidos operates. \u00a0 Baker\u2019s philosophy regarding community organizing and the necessity of community involvement for change greatly informs the work of Padres Unidos as an organization by bolstering their methods of employing \u201cover 590 parents and volunteers\u201d in their execution of the organization\u2019s mission since 1999 (Padres Unidos, 2020).\u00a0 Saul Alinsky\u2019s work, particularly in Chicago into the 1960s, focused upon \u201cusing \u2018people power\u2019 to counter the \u2018money power\u2019 of the Chicago political machine and to gain seats at the decision-making tables (Martinson & Su, 2012, pp. 59-60),\u201d working to harness the power of communities to confront oppression.\u00a0 In an area where wealth is not easily accessible or available, Alinsky\u2019s framework assists in further examining how Padres Unidos emphasizes personal involvement in the organization and the community to incite change, rather than depending on financial backing.<\/span><\/p>\n Pedagogical Practices:<\/p>\n In addition to focusing on community organizational frameworks, frameworks useful in the analysis of Padres Unidos\u2019s work and impact in the community as an organization include pedagogical practices. Emdin and Freire primarily focus on pedagogical methods, directly engaging with student education.\u00a0 <\/span>Christopher Emdin discusses the importance of negating power dynamics within a teaching space and building a mutual relationship between a student and educator by \u201cmeeting each student on his or her own cultural and emotional turf (Emdin, 2016, pp. 30),\u201d particularly significant to a place as distinct as Santa Ana in the case of Padres Unidos\u2019s work.\u00a0 The notion of sharing a context with students or at least extending empathy to their positionality connects both to pedagogical ideas of supporting students where they stand and to the community-centric framework of Baker in how those in the community may be best enabled to understand, educate, and support youth in their own community.\u00a0 From Paulo Freire, I drew the philosophies of mutual education towards a fuller understanding of personhood and learning, that \u201c<\/span>Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers <\/span>and <\/span><\/i>students (Freire, 2005, 72),\u201d and how this idea informs a more holistic idea of learning.\u00a0 Freire\u2019s lens focused upon holistic learning permeates the organizational structure of Padres Unidos and is present in the expansive nature of their program to best work to address the needs of their community.\u00a0 These frameworks underscore the importance of an organization like Padres Unidos in the context of their work, and I will work to examine the non-profit through the analytic lense of these notions.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Community-Based Organizing: Conceptual frameworks applicable to the Santa Ana region and the niche that Padres Unidos serves include works from Ella Baker, Saul Alinsky, Christopher Emdin, and Paulo Freire.\u00a0 In the works of Baker and Alinsky, themes focused on grassroots organizing emerge to meditate on and guide how communities can move towards change together.\u00a0 Together, … Continue reading “Conceptual Framework”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1170,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-275","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1170"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/education-2272-fall-2020-mngo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}