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This chapter reviews the HIV prevention landscape in regard to Latinas, rooted in both the experience of community-based organizations (CBOs), as implementers of interventions, and Latino-specific cultural scripts and values, providing concrete examples of HIV prevention programs currently being delivered. The chapter deconstructs four HIV prevention interventions, recently implemented by CBOs in different parts of the United States, into surface and deep level cultural considerations. Engaging with the structural and environmental contexts of HIV risk, the interventions addressed barriers to participation, took women out of their often-constrained social roles, promoted local activism, and engaged participants in conversations about migration and transnational identity as Latinas. The chapter ends by addressing future opportunities as well as structural barriers by looking at microbicides and PReP, interventions with the potential to place protection control in the hands of women.

The involvement of civil society organizations and community-based organizations in the global response to the HIV epidemic is unparalleled in public health history. The successful impact of such mobilization is nowhere more evident than in South Africa, where these organizations have had tremendous success in shaping the response to HIV in one of the world's highest burdened countries. Using the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the AIDS Budget Unit (ABU) at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) as case studies, this chapter briefly looks at the government's relationship with civil society organizations, the cooperation amongst these organizations and how these various parties interact to directly influence policies and combat the effects of HIV on the country.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the United States, most sexually active men who have sex with men (MSM) involved in relationships outside their regular partner were routinely practicing safer sex most of the time. Gay men had learned to use condoms correctly, had reduced their number of partners, and were engaging in less risky sexual practices. Many had participated in HIV risk reduction workshops targeting the gay community. Others were serving as “buddies” to assist gay men with AIDS through their local AIDS community-based organizations. Today, things have changed. “Barebacking” (anal sex without condoms) has increasingly become acceptable behavior. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reevaluated their data and concluded that the number of new cases of HIV infection per year was not 40,000 as estimated, but rather was closer to 56,300, and it had been at that level for several years. Applied medical anthropologists are in a unique position to understand the dynamics of HIV risk among MSM throughout the world and to contribute to the amelioration of this health crisis.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to open up a wider lens on the social processes underlying poverty, opportunity, and inequality in an attempt to understand how elements of social structure that extend beyond interpersonal relationships contribute to poverty and its related social problems. Specifically, it examines how formal organizations working toward a variety of economic and political ends make decisions that collectively produce the conditions that poor people face in everyday life, and under whose constraints the poor make daily choices. The chapter then discusses the structure of poverty, the challenge of social integration and social order in the city, an organizational perspective on social integration, the rise of community-based organizations in the city, and community-based organizations in Brooklyn.

In the spring of 2006, about 150,000 protestors took part in three major demonstrations in Denver, Colorado. This chapter focuses on the coalition of community-based organizations (CBOs) that drove the 2006 protests in Colorado and, specifically, in the city of Denver. The coalition mobilized Latinos and immigrants, and this chapter explores how CBOs mobilized thousands of protestors in light of opposition (by Latinos and non-Latinos, Republicans and Democrats, and anti-immigrant groups) and negative public perceptions that mounted during the course of the movement. Drawing on fifty-five interviews with CBO leaders, activists, and elected officials, the chapter shows that the 2006 marches were carefully coordinated and would not have been as massive without the combined efforts of a coalition of immigrant rights groups, social justice organizations, the Service Employees International Union, the Colorado Catholic Conference, and community activists. Using political opportunity theory, the chapter describes how organizers mobilized protestors; the tactics, strategies, and frames they employed; and their response to the anti-immigrant countermovement.

This chapter tells the story of what grew in the void left behind when the growth machine abandoned Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a neighborhood whose pre-World War II working-class, immigrant residents decamped for the suburbs during the 1950s—and what happened to its new, poorer denizens when the growth machine returned in the 1990s. It is a story that revolves around the activities of several community-based organizations devoted to seeking, creating, and protecting housing for poor local residents. It is also a story about how these organizations' ability to secure their constituents places to live has been facilitated and constrained by the particular manifestations of larger economic and political forces operating in the city.

Nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) are key players in an expanding arena of public social provision: privately delivered direct services. Devolution has actually decreased the total public dollars being spent on these services, but privatization has rapidly increased the amounts being funneled through government service contracts to CBOs. Together, these two national policy shifts have greatly altered the face of social provision to the poor. Current sociological theories of public social provision, with their focus on income support, miss out on this important component of the social benefit package. More and more, the well-being of the poorest citizens depends on state- and local-level decisions about how to allocate public service contracts.

Urban politics largely focus on a competition for critical resources: along with affordable, quality housing, residents of poor urban neighborhoods need parks, clean streets, safety, quality education, and so on. Poor neighborhoods usually lose out in this competition, finding themselves with substandard housing, few if any green spaces, irregular trash collection, high crime rates, and failing schools. The story of Los Sures and the United Jewish Organizations captures the response of Williamsburg's Latinos and Hasidim to the devastated housing conditions of their neighborhood. The two community-based organizations' (CBOs) unique solutions to that problem involved significant political engagement with the city's housing bureaucracy and other actors in the housing field. This chapter examines the distinctive uses of politics by two CBOs—the Ridgewood–Bushwick Senior Citizens Council and Saint Barbara's Catholic Church—in a second poor Brooklyn neighborhood, Bushwick, which lies just east of Williamsburg.

In this chapter, I discuss migrant community-based organizations (CBOs) operating in Thailand that work to combat labor exploitation in wholly different ways. Run by ethnic women and operating “below the radar” of the anti-trafficking movement, these organizations address the issue of trafficking from a unique perspective. Rather than pressuring sex workers to enter “rehabilitation” programs, these groups operate in solidarity with female migrants, fostering participatory, rather than top-down approaches to combating trafficking. As a result, these CBOs engage an ethic of “horizontalism”—an organizational approach to social change that is based on partnership, trust, and mutual understanding between the organization and its beneficiaries. I show how, through offering female migrant laborers positive alternatives to the tropes of victimization commonly used by anti-trafficking NGOs, their work is generating more productive results.

This chapter outlines the challenges of obtaining institutional review board (IRB) coverage for community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects. Community-based participatory research focuses on problems that affect whole communities and thus is different from most biomedical research, which takes the individual as its primary subject. In CBPR projects, researchers work closely with community members and community-based organizations to develop appropriate research agendas, conduct analyses, and disseminate results and information. In general, IRBs are unfamiliar with this approach to research, reluctant to take responsibility for the actions of community partner organizations, and resistant to interaction between researchers and participants. Their hesitation causes significant delays and may prevent effective research and dissemination of results. The chapter then suggests concrete ways in which IRBs and funders can develop clear review guidelines that respect the unique qualities of CBPR.

This chapter explores the role of the community in restorative justice. It provides multiple examples of ways in which community-based organizations and systems have failed offenders and their family members. Specifically explored are: child protective and interpersonal violence services; mental health and drug and alcohol treatment; schools; juvenile justice; and faith communities. Toward remediating the harm caused by a broken system, or to stem systems that continue to fail, the chapter offers several examples of community-based restorative responses. The goal of these responses is to support the development of caring communities that are proactive in preventing crime by addressing systems failure and inequality.

This chapter explores the different dimensions of participation found in the community-based organizations (CBOs) of Williamsburg and Bushwick, focusing on the interplay between organizational goals and the forms of individual participation that different CBOs cultivate, encourage, and downplay. Some Williamsburg and Bushwick CBOs do in fact emphasize participatory forms that aim for individual transformation, and are less concerned with enhancing the organization's capacity to exert pressure within wider economic and political fields. Other CBOs encourage forms of participation that stabilize the organizations' existence—a necessary first step if a CBO is to bargain within fields to improve the set of opportunities available to local residents. The specific forms of participation that various Williamsburg and Bushwick CBOs activate complement these organizations' distinct theories of how participation can strengthen their position within the economic and political fields in which they operate.

In a world where meeting the twin responsibilities of making money and discharging domestic duties has become considerably more complex than in the past, community-based organizations (CBOs) form a key piece of the survival system for low-income families. For one thing, they serve as important sources of employment for neighborhood residents. From Los Sures in Williamsburg to the New Life Child Development Center in Bushwick, CBOs create jobs and provide an environment that eases residents with limited employment histories into paid work. Although many CBO jobs are low paying or part time, they often are appropriate for the skill levels of local residents. CBOs also organize the provision of several critical domestic-sphere services that make it possible for adult family members to engage in paid work in the first place; taking care of children and assisting elderly relatives with daily living tasks are the most important of these. This chapter details some of the ways that they connect local residents to paid work, both by creating opportunities to earn money and by helping to fulfill domestic responsibilities.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. The primary goal of this book has been to offer an alternative for theoretically grounding empirical investigation of the problem of social integration and social order in the city and beyond. It has challenged the notion that, in contemporary society, integration and order are produced principally within geographically bounded subareas of the city. The book has argued that integration and order derive substantially from the distribution of resources and opportunities within particular fields of economic and political action—such as housing production, government spending, and employment—and that the competitive and cooperative processes underlying this distribution should thus be a principal focus of urban sociologists interested in poverty and inequality. An examination of the economic and political fields within which community-based organizations carry out their daily activities also yields a more complete understanding of how social integration and social order are produced in contemporary society.

This chapter deals with policy measures needed for breaking the conflict trap in the NER. A four-fold measure has been suggested. First, promotion of economic development of the NER through cross-border development cooperation as the dynamics of national development framework has failed to address the issue, and breaking the physical isolation of the region by transforming itself from being landlocked to landlinked is only possible through cross-border cooperation. Second, improving the governance by way of adopting federal solution to separatist and secessionist demands and practising the politics of accommodation rather than politics of exclusion. Third, as the sphere of operation of the militant movements transcend the territorial boundary of the nation states; it is, thus, important to engage the neighbouring nations for preventing violence. Fourth, the nation states have to work together to redefine the concept of ‘right to self-determination’ to mean ‘right to self-governance’ rather than ‘right to political independence’.