Community empowerment practices encompass multiple levels, strategies, and specialized techniques. This means that the direct interaction between empowers and those being empowered (community leaders and volunteer teams) creates a multidimensional and potentially dynamic environment. Helping empowers prepare in advance, particularly by providing modular empowerment tools or materials, to ensure predictable empowerment actions and outcomes is a professional responsibility. Empowerment modules serve as effective intermediary tools that empower organizations integrate into their planning and empowerment practitioners to leverage their expertise to promote community capacity building.
In fact, various human services professions, including healthcare and education, often utilize pre-prepared work modules in conjunction with specialized tools to maximize the effectiveness of their services.
As community empowerment becomes more professionalized, practitioners have developed numerous community empowerment modules based on their practical experience. These modules can be broadly categorized into four main categories: empowering pellets, empowering solutions, empowering methods, and empowering actions.
Empowering pellets, as streamlined empowering design units, often represent the most superficial empowering services and are depicted in the upper portion of the diamond. In contrast, empowering solutions involve liberating false consciousness and translating key concepts, involving deeper theories and consciousness, representing a deeper level of knowledge or cognitive activity, and are depicted in the lower portion of the diamond. Empowering methods are systematic designs involving a wider range of empowering services, but remain foundational and are depicted in the center left of the diamond. Empowering actions, representing the true goal of empowerment practice—concrete public welfare and public service actions, are developmental and are arranged in the center right of the diamond.
A empowering pellet refers to a unit of empowering action or design. An empowerment unit can be a single training session or briefing session. Because it's a single session, it's called a "single." Single empowerment sessions often utilize pre-prepared materials or teaching aids, which, like a ready-made medicine, are called "elixirs." "Empowerment elixir" implies refinement and concentration, and calling it an empowerment elixir emphasizes the prior preparation and refinement of empowerment actions. Empowerment "elixirs" are suitable for the most basic empowerment programs. Because they target a large number of communities (and leaders), they are well-suited for pre-prepared instructional materials or teaching aids. Because they involve a large number of participants and pre-prepared teaching aids, these empowerment programs are best implemented by social workers.
Empowerment interpretation (explanation/liberative empowerment) refers to two types of translational interpretation. 1. It involves interpreting academic or policy concepts in a way that aligns with the recipients' (i.e., community cadres or volunteers) cultural and class understandings (Li Yijun, 2019). 2. It achieves consciousness-raising through interpretation, thereby helping community cadres liberate themselves from false consciousness. It is a deep empowerment effort that combats societal false consciousness and erroneous practices.
Because community organization cadres may be elderly, have low levels of education, and lack the ability to read official documents, they may be unable to properly grasp the meaning of government documents or related policy plans, necessitating interpretive translation by empowerment professionals. This interpretation involves more than just a superficial explanation of the text; it requires culturally and class-specific explanation and translation. Empowerment professionals performing the translation must deeply understand the underlying and essential meaning of the policy or document and be familiar with the cultural and class-specific language of their audience (i.e., community cadres and volunteers) to provide accurate and precise interpretations. Liberatory empowerment targets false consciousness. Its ostensible target is community cadres, but its true objective is the false consciousness held by these cadres. This false consciousness often stems from the narratives and indoctrination of those in power—rhetoric that appears reasonable but defies rational scrutiny, or from slogans, arguments, and even programs that have become commonplace. Especially in situations where conventional community development is prevalent, empowerment solutions are particularly necessary to help community cadres liberate themselves from these false consciousnesses and clarify the goals of community development and the mission of community organizations.
In this regard, empowerment solutions focus on redeveloping a narrative centered on community organization operations and the community, then communicating this newly developed rational narrative to community cadres and related personnel, thereby liberating their consciousness and rebuilding a sense of community ownership.
An empowering program (program/prescription) refers to an empowerment program. An empowering program (program/prescription) is a systematic or serial empowerment design, and can also be composed of several empowering programs. Compared to general programs, empowerment formulas emphasize the empirical basis of action and/or logical connection to theory. They are called "formulas" because they are empowerment programs, and their emphasis on empirical basis (or connection to theory and logic) makes them more appropriately called "formulas," similar to "proven prescriptions" in medicine.
Because empowerment formulas are systematic programs, they encompass numerous empowerment designs and require a clear theoretical foundation and logical connection. Furthermore, because they encompass multiple empowerment designs, they may require the coordinated efforts of multiple staff members. Furthermore, when systematic empowerment work targets the community (i.e., community cadres and volunteer teams), it also requires the coordinated efforts of multiple staff members when dealing with a large number of service recipients.
In short, community formulas respond to the complexity of community empowerment work. The systematic combination of multiple empowerment units, the large and diverse number of empowered individuals and clients, and the number of staff members required necessitate scientific, systematic, and integrated planning and arrangement of empowerment work.
Empowering for action refers to designing guidance that empowers community organizations and leaders to take action. While the goal of community empowerment is to enhance community capacity, the ultimate goal beyond capacity enhancement is for community organizations to serve as delivery units for public services—that is, to provide public services. In other words, the core of empowering for action is public service action.
While insufficient capacity is certainly a major reason why community organizations fail to engage in public services, just as community empowerment or community capacity is a series of steps, how to appropriately assess the capacity of individual communities and guide and inspire community leaders to take action within their capabilities is the professional expertise of empowerment professionals and a crucial task in guiding community organizations into service.
In terms of form, empowering for action is similar to general program design, but it is neither a course nor a service. Rather, it is an action exercise.
Application of Community Empowerment Modules
Empowerment modules are not standalone tasks; rather, they are considered within the overall service delivery process. Flexible and individualized design arrangements are implemented based on the specific circumstances and needs of the service recipients. Service design and a series of service units are implemented within the framework of case management. In other words, the four types of empowerment modules are appropriately incorporated into these individual management arrangements.
Of course, individual empowerment organizations, professionals, and teams are also adapting or developing new empowerment modules based on existing ones to provide more applicable and universal applications.