THIS CHAPTER’S PRIMARY FOCUS is on helping practitioners classify examples of innovative efforts at the outreach, engagement, and assisting of baby boomers of color, with an emphasis on utilization of cultural assets. The previous chapters on family and community assets provided the reader with an appreciation of the range that can be found within these two arenas. Determining when and where to undertake these types of initiatives requires a community assessment.
Asset-driven interventions stress the role of empowerment and participatory democratic principles through partnerships between baby boomers of color and human service organizations. Further, asset-driven efforts also undertake community capacity enhancement in the process of engaging boomers of color in service to their communities (Delgado, 1999). They build upon community assets to significantly alter community environment to better serve and enlist the support of boomers of color.
Categorizing interventions in a manner that facilitates their understanding and use by practitioners represents an important step in shaping practice. There is a call for increased research specific to boomers of color because of the unique set of demographics and circumstances they bring to human services. Washington and Moxley (2008), for example, speak to the need for using innovative initiatives and programming, such as the arts and humanities, for developing a better understanding of homeless boomer and older African American women and why their perspective must guide service delivery to this vulnerable group. These types of initiatives have an increased chance of success when they are grounded within cultural values and actively seek the input of these boomers in shaping them.
Gilroy offers a simple but profound recommendation: “the starting point is listening to older people … the considerable potential of elders as a creative and active resource for the community can be released through innovative methodologies…. Policy makers, service providers and researchers need to be more imaginative in promoting methods that fuse product and process: in working with older people in these creative ways these methods can also make a contribution to quality of life. Older people are increasingly looking for voice in their communities” (Gilroy, 2006, p. 354).
CLASSIFYING AND EVALUATING PRACTICE
Categorizing asset-focused boomer initiatives plays a critical role in facilitating the introduction and support of this paradigm for social work. Fortunately, an increasing number of ways to classify these types of initiatives is available. Lehning (2012), for example, based on a meta-analysis, developed a typology that assigns older-adult initiatives into five categories that can then be used for evaluation and sustainability efforts: (1) communitywide planning, (2) consumer-driven support networks (peer groups), (3) cross-sector systems change initiatives (interagency collaborations), (4) residence-based support services, and (5) single-sector services. Their typology, with certain modifications, can be used for conceptualizing and implementing a range of asset-focused boomer of color initiatives.
There are other classification typologies that can be tapped to assist practitioners in developing boomer-focused initiatives. Delgado and Humm-Delgado (2013), in their book titled Asset Assessments and Community Social Work Practice, for example, have laid out a conceptual foundation for classifying assets and identified the assessment methods that lend themselves to gathering this form of data, also empowering and increasing community participation in the process.
CLASSIFICATION TYPOLOGY
The following three-part classification and seven-point criteria for evaluating practice holds much promise for the field. As the reader will see, they bring rewards and inherent challenges, as any framework would. Practices can be categorized into three classes: (1) best practices, (2) promising practices, and (3) emerging practices. Determining into which of these three categories to put a particular practice is not simple, as the decision often requires a judgment call. Nevertheless, these three categories can assist practitioners in better serving boomers of color by identifying challenges and gaps in evidence.
Best practices: Most social workers and other helping professionals are well versed in the concept of evidenced-based practice and the importance of using evidence to shape interventions. The concept of evidence-based practice is an integral part of our lexicon, although not without controversy. The Council on Social Work Education has stressed the importance of evidence in determining social work content covered in social work departments and schools (Franklin & Hopson, 2007). Social workers, however, may not be familiar with the following concepts of promising and emerging practices.
Promising practices: Promising practices refers to interventions that have all the elements associated with effective practice but have not benefited from research validation and extensive scrutiny by impartial reviewers. When these programs are reviewed, if the evidence warrants, they will be classified as evidenced based. There is still work to be done, using research to substantiate these practices, but their promise makes this investment worthwhile.
Emerging practices: Finally, emerging practices represents innovative interventions that are new and capture excitement, reflecting the best principles and values associated with practice. These interventions, however, have not been subject to independent research and review but still show signs of effectiveness and resonate with communities. With closer attention and research, emerging practices may eventually fall into the promising or even best practices category. Nevertheless, they are not there at this point in time.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Cummings and colleagues (2011) identified seven criteria that can be applied to best, promising, and emerging practices: (1) culturally appropriate, (2) effectiveness, (3) impact, (4) replicability, (5) scalabilty, (6) sustainability, and (7) innovativeness. These criteria are of equal importance; however, practitioners and organizations may emphasize some over others. Ideally, interventions can be assessed using all seven.
Culturally appropriate: Social workers are familiar with a cultural criterion. Interventions that are guided and incorporate key elements related to culture and assets, such as language, values, symbols, acculturation, and legal status, meet this requirement. All of the examples discussed in the following chapter integrate various cultural elements to reach and engage boomers of color. Interventions that are culturally appropriate are sufficiently nuanced to take into account local circumstances and are sufficiently dynamic to also incorporate changes in culture over time.
Effectiveness: This criterion relies upon research findings substantiating the goals and objectives of an intervention. Effectiveness is associated with evidence-based data; the role and importance of data cannot be underestimated in an age where measurable results are so critical in program funding and program development. Further, these findings must have been published in scholarly outlets to add an additional measure of “worthiness” or legitimacy.
Impact: Interventions often are measured based upon how successfully they alter the lives of the population group they target. A weight-loss nutrition and exercise regimen, for example, should actually result in the loss of weight. It isn’t enough to measure participant’s attendance in a program or how well participants enjoy a program; the program must actually deliver results.
Reliability: The ability of an intervention and its results to be duplicated or reproduced among new clients and/or populations is very important, particularly when discussing interventions that are funded as demonstration projects. Achieving this measure is predicated upon a sufficient number of projects being studied to facilitate translation of findings. Unfortunately, the examples of asset-focused projects with boomers of color have not advanced sufficiently to achieve the goal of replicability. The challenge associated with a nuanced approach that is specifically tailored to account for unique aspects of boomer ethnicity and race stands out as to why replication is so arduous and necessary.
Scalability: Flexibility in program design size becomes an important consideration in order to allow local circumstances (e.g., agency history, budget, characteristics of community) to dictate the nature and scope of an intervention. All the interventions covered in the next chapter should be sufficiently flexible to be implemented in a variety of locales.
Sustainability: Social interventions must be sensitive to the need for communities to rely upon them over a period of time. It takes a considerable amount of time to create positive organization-community relations. Consequently, organizations must endeavor to develop programs that will be in existence over an extended period. These interventions, as a result, should not be capital intensive, but should instead be structured in a manner that encourages collaboration, local contributions, enlistment of volunteers, and a minimum reliance on extensive financing.
Sustainable efforts to reach and engage boomers of color requires social workers and their organizations to venture out into communities and develop collaborative relationships with a wide range of formal and informal, or nontraditional, settings. The role and importance of collaboration is well understood in human service sectors, but so are the challenges of getting two or more institutions to work together in pursuit of a common goal. Nontraditional settings are starting to get attention in relation to boomers, both as settings for boomers to obtain needed information and as possible places where they can be recruited for civic engagement in the formal sector.
Current efforts have attempted to offer social and health services through houses of worship in African American and Latino/a communities. Delgado (2008) advocates for boomers and older adults of color to be enlisted in planning and leading health promotion efforts within houses of worship. These institutions are accessible (geographically, psychologically, culturally, and operationally), making them very attractive. Robbins (2012) recommends that service providers not overlook libraries as settings for reaching out to baby boomers carrying out caregiver roles because these are places they patronize and feel comfortable with. Barbershops and beauty parlors have been nontraditional urban settings that have pioneered highly innovative services that are gender specific (Delgado, 1998). These efforts have illustrated the immense potential that nontraditional settings bring to reaching and engaging at-risk population cohorts in manners that are nonstigmatizing. Collaboration serves many different purposes and facilitates the sharing of resources and experiences as well as the reduction of costs.
There are a variety of ways of thinking about consumer-driven initiatives. The concept of older-adult led is without question the most empowering and participatory manner in which to bring these types of asset-focused initiatives to life (Delgado, 2008). The vast majority of baby boomer asset-focused interventions in this chapter can be considered sustainable.
Innovative: Asset-based interventions are by their very nature innovative and will probably continue to be considered as such. A “business as usual” approach will not be successful with this cohort.
The use of a classification typology and development of criteria for assessing programs provides a handle for practitioners and academics in helping to determine the rewards and challenges associated with various forms of intervention. Initiatives that can lend themselves to evaluation and replication will survive and prosper; those that cannot survive will face hurdles and may eventually not survive.
The introduction of an assets perspective on boomers of color brings great potential for innovation and the excitement that often accompanies bold new approaches. Unfortunately, bold new approaches also bring resistance to change and cause anxiety, and this can be coupled with the presence of racism, classism, and ageism to make these changes in thinking and service delivery that much more arduous to accomplish. This chapter has provided a broad overview, furnishing brief examples, of a way to classify innovative initiatives that tap boomer of color assets.
As covered in this chapter as well as previous ones, embrace of an assets perspective toward boomers of color serves to strengthen the social work professions’ abilities to make significant contribution to this group and their community. All population groups benefit from an assets perspective. However, boomers of color that are marginalized by society stand to make the greater gains and even greater contributions. The following chapter provides the reader with policy for, practice in, and research implications of embracing an assets paradigm.
