1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«This article presents a holistic single case study of a group of independent, grassroots, community‐based organisations called Family Resource Centres in the province of Québec, Canada. It is both descriptive, as it aims to describe how two macro‐level phenomena—NPM [new public management] and a provincial community of practice—impacted micro‐level community‐based organisations and explanatory, as it aims to explain why these different effects came to be […].» (p. 2576)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The data was collected as part of the provincial community of practice’s program evaluation (the second author was the principal investigator) and a qualitative study about the experience of Family Resource Centres’ staff (the first author was the principal investigator). […] The first author conducted 36 in‐depth semi-structured interviews with six directors and 12 workers from 17 Family Resource Centres that participated in the community of practice. [Moreover], the first author visited more than 25 Family Resource Centres, participated in more than 20 meetings of the community of practice, seven national meetings of Family Resource Centres and various activities related to the evaluation of the program. Therefore, many informal discussions with families, workers, directors and leaders of the movement informed this case study.» (p. 2576) Les auteurs ont aussi consulté des documents institutionnels et ont recueilli leurs observations dans un journal de bord.

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

Results show that «Family Resource Centres used a community of practice to expand their culture of recognition and permission to include, not only families and communities but also workers and directors of their organizations. This initiative increased the recognition and decreased the precarity of the Autonomous Community Action for and with Families movement. It fostered high‐quality, continuously improving, coherent, diverse and flexible actions with families, without an explosion of the cost or size of the movement. Their success opens up interesting avenues of discussion for community psychologists who want to figure out how to coordinate and strengthen micro‐level social justice endeavours. […] Even though there are numerous quality programs, social injustices around the globe persist and even progress. Creating more and more ameliorative actions is not a solution, but coordinating our efforts might be. AGORA [the provincial community of practice program that has been developed] points toward two significant landmarks for the question of governance in community action: Values and participation. […] Real participation is fostered in relatively small and homogenous communities […] and using a token group of a specific population […] to inform decisions, although commendable, hardly accounts for their reality. AGORA proposes another avenue, where a hierarchy of small participative communities […] successfully propelled the united voice of a wide and diverse group of people.» (p. 2582-2583)