Spiritual_Wellness_Holistic_Health_and_the_Practic

Health Promotion and Empowerment 187
tomatoes. Clearly, empowerment exists at both levels, and must be supported at both
levels. Often small group developers or community organizers fail to recognize that
these two levels — the personal or interpersonal and the sociopolitical — are not contradictory,
but complementary. We need groups that nurture the soul, and groups that
challenge the status quo.
Community Organization
Community organization describes the process of organizing people around problems
or issues that are larger than group members ’ own immediate concerns. Community
organization implies choice on the part of professionals and their agencies to work with
some community groups, and not with others. Although there is no true consensus
within the health sector on which community groups warrant support, there is growing
acceptance of an advocacy framework of action, explicitly recognizing that priority
community groups are those whose income, educational, occupational, and general
social class positioning place them low within the hierarchy of political and economic
power (Labonte, 1993b; Watt & Rodmell, 1988; City of Toronto , 1991).
Although community organizing may strive for inclusivity in community -building,
relatively powerless groups usually seek to correct their imbalance by limiting the
power other groups have over them. These groups often create their group identity as
a community in opposition to or conflict with those groups that are more powerful than
themselves. This dynamic has been at the base of all Alinsky - style social action organizing
efforts, the confrontational we/they approach to organizing that has been used
successfully to create community groups from the seemingly intractable conditions of
isolation and apathy (Ward, 1987). The healthful importance of conflict in social
change processes is often overlooked in a health promotion/empowerment rhetoric of
consensus, which frequently defines empowerment as a non - zero - sum commodity
(Israel et al., 1994). In one respect, this is true; to the extent that consensual, caring
social relations are nurtured, all will benefit, including those who currently occupy
privileged hierarchical positions. This is intimated in research linking higher life
expectancy rates with lower slopes in various measures of social hierarchy (Wilkinson,
1990). But coercive forms of one group ’ s power over might only be restrained, in zero -
sum fashion, by another group ’ s ability to prevent it. This point is similar to the earlier
argument that empowerment exists in power being simultaneously taken and given;
power exists dialectically as an aspect of social relations, rather than as a commodity.
Community organizing often extends beyond mobilizing new groups to supporting
existing groups on the issues important to group members. As relations between
health agencies and community groups develop, health workers need to consider in
what it is they are inviting community groups to participate, as the following story
illustrates.
A health educator for a city health department convened a committee on housing
and health with activists from housing rights groups. These groups wanted safer, better
heated and ventilated, and more affordable housing. The health educator agreed