Our Model for Community Change and Improvement:
Some Core Principles, Assumptions, and Values to Guide the Work
Learn about values, principles, and assumptions that guide community health and development efforts.
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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY VALUES, PRINCIPLES, AND ASSUMPTIONS?
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CORE VALUES OF THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX
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CORE PRINCIPLES OF THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX
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ASSUMPTIONS OF THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX
The work of community health and development is both science and art. On the one hand, it grows from the lessons of experience learned by community activists and professionals trying to create systems, programs, interventions, and policy that improve the lives and health of everyone in communities. On the other hand, it stems from the passion for social justice, equity, and fairness that leads people to work to create healthy communities where all citizens, regardless of their backgrounds or circumstances, have what they need.
The commitment to community doesn’t arise out of nowhere. It comes from and is guided by values, principles, and assumptions that spring from our backgrounds and cultures, from our experiences, and from our conscious decisions about what is right. These values, principles, and assumptions shape our vision of the world as it should be, and motivate us to try to make it so.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a framework for the chapters that follow.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY VALUES, PRINCIPLES, AND ASSUMPTIONS?
The terms values, principles, and assumptions are sometimes used as if they all mean the same thing – the underlying truths on which we base our dealings with the world. In fact, although they are all “truths” to some extent, they are different in meaning and substance. Although we realize how similar they are, we’ll try to consider each of the three. Understanding the difference can help us sort out when we’re operating on facts or well-examined experience, when we’re applying moral or ethical rules or judgments, and when we’re responding to emotion or bias or unexamined “knowledge” that may not be accurate.
All of these – facts and experience, morality, ethics, bias, emotion, “common knowledge” – can be legitimate reasons for action in some circumstances. (It’s hardly logical to be non-violent in the face of racist police armed with clubs and vicious dogs; the moral imperative for those in the Civil Rights Movement was more important than facts and experience in that situation.) The importance of knowing the difference is understanding your own motivation, and acting accordingly.
VALUES
Values are our guidelines for living and behavior. Each of us has a set of deeply held beliefs about how the world should be. For some people, that set of beliefs is largely dictated by a religion, a culture, a peer group, or the society at large. For others, it has been arrived at through careful thought and reflection on experience, and is unique. For most of us, it is probably a combination of the two. Values often concern the core issues of our lives: personal relationships, morality, gender and social roles, race, social class, and the organization of society, to name just a few.
PRINCIPLES
Principles are the fundamental scientific, logical, or moral/ethical “truths” arising from experience, knowledge, and values on which we base our actions and thinking. In the case of the Community Tool Box team, they are the underpinning of our understanding of community health and development, the truths that shape both our reasons for doing the work, and the work itself.
Scientific and logical principles are derived from experience and experiment, from knowledge (which itself comes from experience and experiment on the part of someone else), from logical analysis, and/or from theory. They as are objective – as free of bias, untested assumptions, etc., and as firmly based on provable fact or reasoned analysis – as they can be, and are considered true until proven otherwise. They include the physical and other laws by which the universe operates, and their extensions into the sphere of human action (If you run into a tree at 70 miles an hour, you’ll probably be seriously injured or killed. If you drive your car when you’re drunk, you don’t have much judgment or control, making it much more likely that you’ll hit that tree at 70 miles an hour. Principle: Don’t drive drunk.)
Scientific and logical principles are typified by such statements as “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” (Newton’s Third Law of Motion)Such principles are either verifiable by observation – a cannonball shooting out of a cannon drives the cannon itself back in the opposite direction, consistent with Newton’s Third Law – or are supported by all the evidence available – thousands of dinosaur fossils, various chemical and geological dating systems – and are “theories” only in the sense that they can’t be fully proven because of the impossibility of traveling back in time or across interstellar space.
Moral and ethical principles are where values come in. These principles grow out of deeply held beliefs and values, and are often the principles upon which community work is founded. Devotion to democratic process, to equity and fair distribution of resources, to a reasonable quality of life for everyone, to the sacredness of life, to the obligation of people to help one another – these all come not from logic or scientific experiment, but from a value system that puts a premium on human dignity and relationships.
One of the clearest statements of moral/ethical principle is that of the American Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson (with Benjamin Franklin’s help) in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”
This statement is actually a good demonstration of how values and principles form a loop, with principles based on values. Jefferson and Franklin may have held these “truths” to be self-evident (i.e., so obvious that they don’t have to be explained or supported), but, the certainty of the American founding fathers had to do with their values, not with any scientific proof that they were right.
At the same time, people may hold the same principles, but interpret them through different value systems. Two individuals may both believe, for instance, that all humans are created equal. For one, this may mean that she has a duty to treat everyone as an equal, and to try to gain equity for all. For the other, it may mean that since everyone starts out equal, anyone who doesn’t achieve or do well is at fault for his failure, and therefore deserves no help or respect.
Even scientific principles are, in some sense, based on values. The use of the scientific method, the adherence to empirical evidence (i.e., evidence actually observed or experienced), the willingness to believe the evidence even when it conflicts with religious or cultural assumptions – these are all characteristics of a value system that puts a high priority on logical and scientific thinking.
Many people around the world subscribe to different values, which place much more importance on religious or cultural traditions than on the work of science.
ASSUMPTIONS
Assumptions are the next level of truths, the ones we feel we can take for granted, given the principles we have accepted. If we accept, for instance, that life is an “unalienable right” – a right of every human being that cannot be taken away – then we will usually assume that killing another person is wrong, or at least that we don’t have the right to do it.
Assumptions are often unexamined. They are the facts or beliefs that we don’t question, because we “know” they’re accurate, even though they may not be. Most of us have been in situations where we’ve had to face the consequences of our incorrect assumptions.
It is nevertheless true that we all bring assumptions to what we do, and the Community Tool Box team is no exception. We hope our assumptions are based on carefully thought out principles, however, and try to reevaluate them to make sure we aren’t operating on false premises.
What follows are some of the core values, principles and assumptions on which the Community Tool Box is based. The lists are not meant to be comprehensive, and are not necessarily in order of priority.
CORE VALUES OF THE COMMUNITY TOOL BOX
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