ADOPT-A-COMMUNITY

The Adopt-A-Community Project is founded with the seven principles of Community Psychology and the core values that it represents. Values that define Individual Wellness, Sense of community, Citizen Participation, Social Justice, Collaboration & Community Strengths, Respect for Human Diversity, and Empirical Grounding.

Help Hayti, while adapting the principles and values of Community Psychology, proposes to launch a 25-year pilot study applying a nonequivalent comparison group design coupled with a multiple baseline time-series format in rural Fond Verrettes located on the southwest border of the Dominican Republic.  Currently, Help Hayti has identified Bois Tombe, the first of nine localities has introduced the Adopt-A-Community focused on two fronts: Improving the literacy rate of the children population (age 3+) and decreasing the rate of deforestation.

VALUES

• 

  SENSE OF COMMUNITY
  This value refers to a perception of belongingness and mutual commitment, which links individuals in a collective unity. It is further define to include interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them, the feeling that one is part of a larger dependable and stable structure.

• 

  CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
  This value refers to peaceful collaborative processes of making decisions that allow all members of a community to have meaningful involvement.
  

• SOCIAL JUSTICE
  This value is defined as fair, equitable allocation of resources, opportunities, obligations, and bargaining power in society as a whole. It also involves advocacy for policies that make resources for wellness to all members of a community or society, especially its least privileged.

• COLLABORATION & COMMUNITY STRENGTHS
  This value involves relationships between community psychologists (activists) and citizens with whom they work. It involves building a respectful, collaborative relationship with community before research or action begins.

• RESPECT FOR HUMAN DIVERSITY
  This value recognizes and prizes the variety of communities and social identities, based on gender, ethnic or racial membership, sexual orientation, ability or disability, socioeconomic status age, or other terms.

• EMPIRICAL GROUNDING
  The Swampscott conference in 1965 marked the emergence of community psychology as a separate discipline, the role of participant-conceptualizer expressed this ideal.