ORIGINAL PAPER Participatory Organizational Change in Community-Based Health and Human Services: From Tokenism to Political Engagement

Abstract Community psychologists have long worked with community-based human service organizations to build participatory processes. These efforts largely aim at building participatory practices within the current indi-vidual-wellness paradigm of human services. To address collective wellness, human service organizations need to challenge their current paradigm, attend to the social jus-tice needs of community, and engage community participation in a new way, and in doing so become more openly political. We use qualitative interviews, focus groups, organizational documents, and participant obser-vation to present a comparative case study of two organizations involved in such a process through an action research project aimed at transforming the organizations’ managerial and practice paradigm from one based on first-order, ameliorative change to one that promotes second-order, transformative change via strength-based approa-ches, primary prevention, empowerment and participation, and focuses on changing community conditions. Four participatory tensions or dialectics are discussed: passive versus active participation, partners versus clients, surplus powerlessness versus collective efficacy, and reflection/ learning versus action/doing