Podcast Interview Transcript
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In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Scotney Evans, Daniella Levine, Catherine Raymond authors of Miami’s Third Sector Alliance for Community Well-being, and PCHP Associate Editor Katherine Smith.
My name is Katherine Cline Smith. I’m on faculty here at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and I’m an associate editor with the journal. And I was the associate editor that was responsible for handling your paper entitled Miami’s Third Sector Alliance for Community Wellbeing, and the work was submitted for the policy and practice section of the journal. We want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit more about the process behind the work that was reported. So can we start by having you give a brief summary of your work, both the what was reported here and perhaps just a little bit of a sense of any ongoing work as well?
This paper started as a little bit of a thought exercise or a thinking paper about how we could work together to fill some of the gaps in our community around building capacity both in organizations themselves, nonprofit community-based organizations, but also across organizations so that there’d be more opportunities to learn together and potentially find ways to intersect and collaborate and build the sector as a whole, not just individual organizations. Early on as part of another group, we did a survey of nonprofit needs in the community, a kind of a traditional needs assessment of what organizations felt their capacity building needs were. And at that point in time in this community, there was nothing going on formally. There were some little pockets of things but not a lot going on to offer learning experiences for people doing community-based work. This paper started as you know what could we design, kind of a design experiment to fill some of the gaps but yet get beyond the traditional thinking about capacity building.
And from your community partner is there anything that you’d like to add there?
I had found Scot and the University of Miami School of Education and Human Development Faculty and as kindred spirits in thinking about community engagement. I worked really hard to find different ways that we could collaborate, including participation in a master’s-level program, not to complete a master’s but some [End Page 233] master’s-level courses on the spec model (strengths, prevention, empowerment, and community change) and got to know Dr. Evans in that regard. It became clear that he was a wonderful academic partner, and I had spent a lot of time on the idea of academic community partnerships as vehicles for social change. And so his interests were very compatible with my organization, Catalyst Miami, and he was the kind of person who really took partnership seriously and wasn’t just doing it for an academic credential to publish but was really looking for ways that could long term have benefit on the organization, on the sector and on the community. It seemed like the perfect way to amplify the nonprofit organization’s work, Catalyst Miami, to build communities. We had been exploring that in several regards to when he approached about writing a paper that would encapsulate what we were striving to do with our partnership. I thought it was an ideal opportunity and we thought it would be a good way to kind of gel our thoughts so that we could share with others and try to get broader buy-in.
Anything that you’d like to add, Catherine?
I think Daniella and Scot have covered it very well so far.
