Ask an Advisor Answers

Thank you for your question. A couple of thoughts come to mind in terms of uniting a community that has been impacted by broader political environments.

• One approach is to hold a listening session to understand what these experiences entail and use these spaces as an opportunity to share issues across groups. You can reference our page on organizing listening sessions here: /en/table-of-contents/assessment/assessing-community-needs-and-resources/conduct-public-forums/main. It might be the case that books aren't addressing what the issue or concern is. From what you learn through the listening sessions, you can then begin to develop some strategies to help facilitate barriers or blocks that different individuals are experiencing. 
• Another approach is to utilize behavior change strategies that focus on promoting motivation, beliefs, and capabilities to ultimately change behaviors and make communities more engaged with political engagement. Here, you might consider designing an initiative that embeds all core components of motivation, beliefs and capabilities. You can review what these involve here: behavior change wheel. The general idea is that the initiative you develop has some element that attempts to reinvigorate motivations to participate. The listening sessions might be a good opportunity to ask people what their dreams are, what success looks like, etc so that they can consider what motivates them. Beliefs are harder to shift, but for this you would try to capture what beliefs people have about parties involved and how it affects their well being. Perhaps, their beliefs only focus on the negative components and this may present an opportunity to offer positive alternatives or outcomes that expand on current beliefs. It might also be the case that people have limited knowledge on how political activities typically function. So, explore these concepts more deeply to understand the state of beliefs among the different groups of people. Capabilities relate to the environment that allows people to participate or utilize skills. Are there opportunities to build their capabilities by training or ensuring they have proper paperwork for engaging in political activities more meaningfully (or certifications), or even the resources to participate in such activities. 

Overall, you will need to expand beyond the book club and consider partnering with other community agencies that are involved in this space to see if they would be interested in collaborating to promote capabilities and motivations among the group of folks you're engaging.