1. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 1
History and Reflection: Huaxi Village
Brianna L. Bates
New York University
Urbanization and Sustainable Development in Transitional China
August 14, 2014

2. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 2
Executive Summary
This paper evaluates the past and present state and growth periods of Huaxi Village. It addresses
similarities and differences in political systems and policy agendas. Traditionally, many cultures
visit Huaxi Village in an attempt to learn from their success and attempt to replicate it. Huxai
Village has many unique circumstantial items that contribute to the current state of economic
success in the Village. This paper discusses Huaxi Village and all that it was, is and wants to be
and encompasses the personal reflection from the view of a visiting American.
Effective Community Organizing

3. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 3
Community organizing is a planned process to activate a community to use its own social
structures and any available resources to accomplish community goals, decided primarily by
community representatives and consistent with local values. Purposeful social change
interventions are organized by individuals, groups or organizations from within the community
to attain and then sustain community changes and/or new opportunities (Bracht & Tsouros,
1990). Successful community organizing can be broken down into four basic phases: assessment,
research, action and reflection. Within each phase are respective sub-phases to examine and
support the overall spirit of the identified goal.
ASSESSMENT AND RESEARCH
Identification
Identifying the cause for which effective community organizing will take place is the
starting point for effective community organizing. Sometimes the cause organically surfaces
based on public injustices that occur but often it is identified through face-to-face conversations
with community members. Even if a cause organically surfaces, for effective organizing
purposes, the face-to-fact conversations should not be skipped. This open assessment process
raises self-awareness of issues to community members and serves to reinforce individual power
for potential impact. This stage of organizing allows the manifestation of the psychological
principle of power to flow through relationships, which ultimately forms social power for a
group. (Speer & Hughey, 1995)
Following proper identification and discussion to narrow the stated cause, research will
spur gathering specific information about the nature of the issues that surfaced during the
assessment phase. The key to productive research is to uncover potential ways in which
allocation of community resources could affect a particular issue and to examine how social

4. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 4
power can be exercised productively around an issue. Initial research themes will lead to the
origin of the movements that will eventually be defined and born from citizen engagement that
will lead to a strategic plan for implementation of community organizing. Looking towards
organizing, it is important to note that at the core of a community are individual citizens. The key
to success in the journey to accomplish effective community organizing is first and foremost the
ability to engage the core of the community, ultimately achieving successful citizen involvement.
(Bracht & Tsouros, 1990)
Successful Citizen Involvement
Specific items must be examined and known in order to create a strategic plan to engage
individual citizens towards effective community organizing efforts. Due to the fact that
community organizing will be different for each community that it is being implemented in,
organizing must be based on knowledge of the demographic being addressed. The plan must be
customized to apply to the citizens within the community that the organizing is being catered to
support. According to Bracht and Tsourus, some key areas of information for a successful plan
include identifying the following prior to any strategy development:
 What is the meaning of participation?
 Where and at what level does participating occur?
 Who participates? For how long? Who does not?
 Why is participation important, what are any benefits and/or obstacles?
 How is participation facilitated?

5. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 5
ACTION
When to Organize
` Based on the responses to the items above, an organizer can gauge whether or not
effective community organizing is possible and/or how difficult the obstacles will be by
knowing the benefits and community dynamics or interest in the cause. Participation must lead to
direct benefit for the community members in order for a platform to exist that would allow or
encourage voluntary formal or informal citizen participation in planned activities or programs.
The networks that organizers will choose to engage, based on the identified benefits, will vary
from formal governmental bodies, volunteer organizations, and smaller special interest groups
with coordinated efforts. Due to the fact that citizen involvement is widely observed and
reinforced as a social norm of community life, the momentum is already in place to draw
participants if there is a vested interest in the potential benefit to come to citizens from
organizing (Bracht & Tsouros, 1990). In addition, leadership demonstrated by community elites
will further help to maintain participation and ultimately for the movement to be successful.
Successful Citizen Activation
Once it is determined that organization is appropriate, steps should be taken to ensure
successful citizen activation beyond basic community knowledge. Outsiders or consultants have
limited knowledge of the community history, organizational resources, potential influential
structures and networks (including past successful or unsuccessful change efforts), it will be
necessary to engage knowledgeable local citizens to share this information. To ensure long term
success, commitment from project sponsors and clearly stated roles and time commitments for
community volunteers through training for development of skills is essential to project success
(Speer & Hughey, 1995). Human nature is responsive to recognition so building regular

6. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 6
opportunities for recognition into the program development structure would significantly
increase the potential for successful engagement long term. Awareness of barriers to change
must be transparent and known at all levels in order to effectively develop a strategy for
successful implementation. For example, if governmental funding is lacking to support the
movement and this is a crucial element for success, a plan must be developed to ensure proper
funding in order to give confidence to active citizens in the success of the efforts. (Bracht &
Tsouros, 1990)
Participation & progress
An organizational structure to ensure participation must be identified that works for the
culture that will be organized. Two of the more popular structures are: participation in formal
decision-making mechanisms where citizens participate in policy-making planning and
implementation or community level activities taken within smaller groups to engage them
(Bracht & Tsouros, 1990). Both involve strategic agendas for formal discussions, community
activities, group formation, voluntary services, social movements, community projects and
management of the projects, neighborhood planning, working with the media, informing the
public, and maintaining momentum. To further ensure success, organizers have historically
found it beneficial and preferable to have those being organized talked to by people similar to
them: woman talking to woman, minorities talking to minorities, etc. (Weinberg, 1997).
Implementing group leadership of groups peers is significant to participants buy-in. All of these
items are all essential to address in relation to the selected organizational structure adopted if the
movement is going to be sustainable and successful in generating wanted support and awareness.
These meetings or displays are essentially demonstrations of social power of the community
organizations, with more individuals exercising power by contributing to the larger

7. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 7
empowerment of the group. Consistent displays of social power will cause the community to
become further empowered, gaining attention which could lead to public debates, influences on
community ideology, and rewards or punishments that will ultimately shape larger social change
(Speer & Hughey, 1995).
REFLECTION
Reflection allows community organizers to assess the various elements of the campaign
and identify where strengths and weaknesses developed. Often reflections allow organizers to
see that the empowerment phenomena must be linked with social power through individual
empowerment that collectively contributes to a larger group empowerment (Speer & Hughey,
1995). Individual empowerment is closely related to self-efficacy, sense of achievement,
personal adjustment, or similar constructs (Rigor, 1993). Due to the fact that subjective feeling is
an important aspect of empowerment, organizers may decide in the future (depending on the
culture) to appeal more to these individual measures of individual empowerment in order to
further empower the group and increase momentum.
While most corporate project models embrace reflection at the completion of the project,
community organizing evolves in such a way that reflection should be an ongoing aspect of
organization, occurring at every point of the process and in response to every decision or smaller
organizational structure within the larger organizational complex. The more reflection that
occurs, the more the process of community organization in relation to a specific agenda can be
refined and improved, which will serve to continually strengthen steps within the larger
construct.

8. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 8
CONCLUSION
Two core items that stay consistent throughout time it relation to effects on community
organizing are the importance of community participation and the vested interest of the
constituency. Community participation is an established process of effective local action and
partnerships between all sectors of the community are ultimately required to effectively bring
improvement and change. In addition, experienced organizers consistently believe that the secret
to a successful campaign is the basic truth that the people involved have to organize themselves,
or it will fail (Weinberg, 1997).
History as a predictor
It is important to note that overtime, the strategies to ensure effective community
organizing have evolved and changed. Trends have gained and lost their drive and interest in
social change. Some trends have become more focused on managing social problems and are
more applicable as short-term solutions on the road to change instead of the catalysts to change
that they used to be. Community organizing often morphs into community development
(Christens & Speer, 2011).
Historically, social action organizing once existed as an instrument for social change in
the 1960’s, a time when community organizing gave a voice to groups that were previously
silenced. The years between the early 1960’s and the mid-1970’s demonstrated immense growth
in community organizing, this was a time when grassroots social experimentation movements
were made in relation to civil rights, new left and woman’s movements and much of this
movement was led by the youth population. During this time, organizing was about social
change and local work was simply a strategy or a means to an end goal. Local organizing served
to further an agenda. In the late 1970’s, professionalization reduced grassroots movements and it

9. History and Reflection: Huaxi Village 9
became more common to see organizations advocating or representing people rather than
organizing them. This movement was further enforced when the sector began to receive support
from the government and private sector, which further caused social change to shift and become
depoliticized. In the 1980’s and 1990’s community organizing emerged as a common practice
and relationship building became central to movements for social change, reverting the power
back to the people. (Christens & Speer, 2011)
Community organizing as it exists today is a product of all of the organizational
approaches that existed before it. It encompasses giving a voice to the oppressed, grassroots
momentum, a space for both youth and minority representation, and political and governmental
awareness and support. Community organizing as it is described today expands on the previous
strategies that were successful for implementing effective human rights change. It has evolved
into a complex matrix of offerings, encompassing the psychology of empowerment of
individuals which in turn empower the masses for change, greater exploration of the wanted
change, increased engagement of citizens, continual assessment and managerial level problem
solving strategies to increase the likelihood of success. It is clear that what it took and what it
takes to achieve effective community organizing has a continually evolving answer. Community
organizing has evolved and will likely continue to evolve as the current time fades to history and
leaders and participants alike reflect and become able to identify areas of improvement, cross-
culturally and beyond.

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Works Cited
Bracht, N., Tsouros, A.(1990). Principles and Strategies of Effective Community Participation.
Health Promotion International, 5 (3), 199-208.
Christens, B., Speer, P. (2011). Contextual Influences on Participation: A Multilevel
Longitudinal Study. Society for Community Research and Action. 47, 253-263.
Spear, P., Hughey, J. (1995). Community Organizing: An Ecological Route to Empowerment
and Power. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23 (5), 729-747.
Weinberg, Paul. (1997). Secrets to Successful Organizing [Interview]. Our Times, 16 (4), 38-42.