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A Welcome Message
from Joe Angelelli
Director of Networking & Development
Pioneer Network
joe.angelelli "at" pioneernetwork.net
The challenge for providers, workers, consumers and policymakers?is to ensure that culture change becomes a normative and ongoing process in all nursing homes and that exemplary practices become a reality, rather than simply a model program, in the day-to-day operations of these organizations. (Robyn Stone, 2003)
Susan Eaton was among the first to publish a review of culture change efforts in long-term care settings. Her use of the term regenerative communities acknowledged one of the earliest explicit efforts to create a community where the developmental potential of elders and workers gets woven into the ?story? of a long-term care setting. In 1977, Debby and Barry Barkan introduced the Regenerative Community model at the Home for Jewish Parents in Oakland, CA and later created the Live Oak Living Center in nearby El Sobrante where they refined the approach.
Last year I had the good fortune to attend a workshop by Debby and Barry at the Eden Alternative Conference. The focus was on how to conduct a daily community meeting in a long-term care setting, what they call their Live Oak Council of Elders. True to form, Debora and Barry shared their wisdom by modeling the behavior -- the workshop itself was a community meeting.
A few weeks after the Eden conference I found myself in Washington, DC at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America. I gave two talks there, one evaluating early adopter Eden Alternative organizations and another "think piece" presentation on the "Myth of Culture Change." At the end of both sessions I had a good number of requests to send along my slides via e-mail.
When I arrived back home and took out all the business cards, I got to thinking that it would be much better if all of those folks (who know just as much about the issue as I do) could communicate about culture change on an on-going basis, rather than meeting bi-annually and communicating only in the rarified air of academic journals.
And then I thought, what we really need is a regular culture change community meeting at the macro level, one in which researchers and practitioners and policy-minded folks can all come together and share their ideas. In so doing we would all adhere to a key principle of every culture change effort: Leadership Must Model the Values.
A critical feature of a good community meeting is the welcoming of newcomers. So......Welcome. The Pioneer Exchange is run using a powerful collaborative media software called Scoop, the power of which should become clearer over time. Each user can compose her own "diaries" (over to the right there) and those diaries can easily be placed on the frontpage if community consensus (and common sense) suggests it.
The roster of front-page posters will evolve over time, depending on who wants to be involved (it could very easily be you reading this!) National leaders in the field (practitioners, academics, policy folks) have agreed to make regular contributions.
Those contributions will highlight the fact that The Pioneer Exchange is not about any single person or particular model of culture change. All of us in the relatively small long-term care community have an opportunity to "get on the same page" (virtually) when it comes to culture change. I hope we can all share and truly model the values that we hope to see in actual long-term care settings, those places that are doing the difficult but joyful work of culture change.
To appreciate means to value, to recognize that which has value-it is a way of knowing and recognizing the best in life. To appreciate also means to increase in value. Combining the two-appreciation as a way of knowing the best and appreciation as an increase in value- suggests that appreciative inquiry is simultaneously a life-centric form of study and a constructive mode of action where valuing is creating, where inquiry and change are powerfully related and understood as a seamless and integral whole. To inquire into the true, the good, the better and the possible is what appreciative inquiry is about...
-- Cooperrider & Whitney |
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