Handbook of Community Practice or Prague in Black

Handbook of Community Practice

Author: Marie Overby Weil

"This volume encompasses a vast range of knowledge on community practice and demonstrates the maturity of this social work domain. It offers a sophisticated treatment of the theoretical underpinnings of community organization as well as the richness of its history. This book will be the major teaching and practice resource for the  predictable future and should be consulted by all social workers, not only those who call themselves community organizers as the entire profession seeks to fulfill its historical mission of working for social transformation."

                                                                            --Charles Garvin, University of Michigan
 
The Handbook of Community Practice is the first volume in this field, encompassing community development, organizing, planning, and social change, and the first community practice text that provides in-depth treatment of globalization--including its impact on communities in the United States and in international development work.  The Handbook is grounded in participatory and empowerment practice including social change, social and economic development, feminist practice, community-collaboratives, and engagement in diverse communities.  It utilizes thesocial development perspective and employs analyses of persistent poverty, policy practice, and community research approaches as well as providing strategies for advocacy and social and legislative action.
 
The Handbook consists of thirty-six chapters, which challenge readers to examine and assess practice, theory, and research methods.  As it expands on models and approaches, delineates emerging issues, and connects policy and practice, the book provides vision and strategies for community practice in the coming decades.

The Handbook will stand as the central reference for community practice, and will be useful for years to come as it emphasizes direction for positive change, new developments in community approaches, and focuses attention on globalization, human rights, and social justice.  It will also be useful to faculty and students of community practice and will provide practitioners with new grounding for planning, development and organizing. 

Table of Contents:

	Preface
1	Introduction : contexts and challenges for 21st-century communities	3
2	History, context, and emerging issues for community practice	34
3	Diverse populations and community practice	59
4	Theorizing in community practice : essential tools for building community, promoting social justice, and implementing social change	84
5	Communities and social policy issues : persistent poverty, economic inclusion, and asset building	103
6	Evolution, models, and the changing context of community practice	117
7	Development theory and community practice	153
8	Sustainable community development	169
9	The practice of community organizing	189
10	Which side are you on? : social work, community organizing, and the labor movement	204
11	Social planning with communities : theory and practice	215
12	From community planning to changing communities : fundraising and fund allocation for human services	244
13	Participatory methods in community practice : popular education and participatory rural appraisal	261
14	Political, social, and legislative action	276
15	Radical community organizing	287
16	Coalitions as social change agents	305
17	Four models of policy practice : local, state, and national arenas	319
18	Multicultural community practice strategies and intergroup empowerment	341
19	Feminist community practice	360
20	Rise up and build the cities : faith-based community organizing	372
21	Service coordination : practical concerns for community practitioners	387
22	Rural community practice : organizing, planning, and development	402
23	Community practice in adult health and mental health settings	418
24	Community practice in children's mental health : developing cultural competence and family-centered services in systems of care models	442
25	Community building and family-centered service collaboratives	460
26	Community economic and social development	475
27	Investing in socially and economically distressed communities : comprehensive strategies for inner-city community and youth development	494
28	Global change and indicators of social development	508
29	Community practice challenges in the global economy	529
30	Women's participation in community economic development : the microcredit strategy	548
31	Revisiting community-based administration, program management, and monitoring	569
32	Fundraising, programming and community organizing : working with donors, investors, collaborators, and purchasers	582
33	Community-based research and methods in community practice	604
34	Empowerment research	620
35	Practice in the electronic community	636
36	Integrating and distributing administrative data to support community change	647

Interesting textbook: Indian Spa Cuisine or Jewish

Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism

Author: Chad Bryant

In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German.

Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as "good Czechs."

By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia's three million Germans and for the Communists' rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

Foreign Affairs

Nazi Germany's bestial cartography divided Czechoslovakia into the incorporated territories, including the Sudetenland, a "neutral" Slovakia, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which were the core Czech lands. Bryant writes well about misery in the last -- about, in particular, the deadly essay of the Germans and their local marionettes to apply madcap ethnic and national concepts to what had long been a hopelessly complex checkerboard of identities. The drama ebbs and flows with events in the larger setting: the war's start, the fall of France in 1940, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Battle of Stalingrad, and, by 1943, Hitler's crumbling prospects. But the brutality takes on special force in response to local circumstances, such as the massacre in response to the 1942 assassination of the German "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich. Would that this were how the story ended: its sad sequel was the vengeful expulsion of Germans, some collaborators but many innocent, at the war's close, three million between 1946 and 1947, a microcosm of the 51 million Europeans driven from their homelands to complement the 60 million killed during the war.<