Working With Others: Coping with Criticism

Whether a volunteer, community committee member, an employee, a member of a family, or a supervisor, we can cope with criticism effectively and learn from it. We can use our energy wisely to ensure a safe, productive and encouraging environment for one another, our organizations and our communities. This document is FCS9211, one of a series of the Family Youth and Community Sciences Department, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida. Original publication date June 1, 2005.

Analysis upon the Youth’s Absence from CVS: Based on a Survey of a Community in Beijing

This article studies the community’s inappropriate volunteer structure. An examination of the questionnaire of a community in Beijing shows the youth are indeed absent from the voluntary service of their community, but it is not because the youth lack the will or motivation to join in the voluntary service. Actually, it is closely related to the insufficient supply of the voluntary service in the community, which is mainly attributable to the bureaucratization of the community committee. Under the precondition of keeping the current social management system unchanged, to spur more youth on to join in the volunteer team of their community has to rely on upgrading related social techniques to enhance the community’s voluntary service supply capability.

Applying Tools From Human-Centered Design to Social Marketing Planning

In this “Tools From the Field” paper, we report our experiences using human-centered design (HCD), a process for using innovation as a means of developing more effective marketing offerings. The context for our use of HCD tools was a partnership with a new community committee. We combined elements of our previous social marketing frameworks -Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) for Program Development; CBPM for Policy Development–into a version better suited to address complex, dynamic problems that require a whole-systems perspective. Our product development work for this next iteration of the CBPM framework incorporated several HCD tools adapted from the prolific design firm, IDEO. The HCD process consists of three phases: inspiration (e.g., learning from those that one is designing for), ideation (e.g., brainstorming and prototyping), and implementation (e.g., building partnerships and launching a business model). In this paper, we describe “tools” for the application of HCD within the context of rapidly prototyping and testing CBPM framework activities for use with our community committee partners; we provide practical advice for the use of these tools (“process points”); and we present a real-world application from development of our new CBPM framework (“tools in action”). Overall, the HCD tools from IDEO helped us see new opportunities for our framework, transform insights into actionable ideas, and increase the speed of producing a minimum viable product and gathering feedback on it from our customers. We believe that HCD tools are worth exploring when it comes to the social marketing planning process.

Democratic Planning in Agriculture, II

The B.A.E.-Extension Service views quoted above stress the importance of securing on planning committees representatives of all economic, social, racial, and geographic groups found in the county. To what extent are such groups represented on planning committees at present?A wide geographic distribution of representation is, of course, more easily secured than any other kind of distribution. Geographic boundaries between groups are easily recognized, and it is usually taken for granted that distinct areas should be separately represented. A distribution based on type-of-farming areas will, of course, mean representation of geographic areas. And geographic distribution will ordinarily achieve some degree of distribution among social, economic, nationality, or other groups. In practically all counties, the county committee includes at least one member from each township, other civil district, or type-of-farming area in the county. Ordinarily this is achieved by making the chairman of each community committee, or other member selected by the community committee, also a member of the county committee. In a few cases where the county committee was set up first, a member from each township or district was made responsible for selecting the members of a community committee for his area.