The system concept and systemic change: Implications for community psychology

The contributions before you are a rich resource for thinking more about system perspectives for teaching and research as well as efforts at induced change. The collective benefit of these contributions is a legacy for more dialogues about the generative power of these ideas to design systemic interventions for different conditions in varied settings. How can these presentations be explored to bring forth wisdom about initiating change and anchoring the processes of changes in organizations and communities? These papers are a collective watershed to respond to this question. A caveat is that community psychologists should not be lulled by the belief that our knowledge is sufficient to address large social processes outside our sphere of influence. The punch line for me in reading these contributions is that they serve as a challenge to place ourselves and our colleagues in positions of influence where systems thinking is a potential resource. Coupled with the creative efforts to develop models and examples of contextual analyses is the political challenge to place ourselves where we can influence governmental responses to organizations and communities. These creative examples challenge community psychology to continue as a deep thinking and activist profession. It is not enough to carry out creative ground breaking explorations. How can such efforts be visible and accessible and within arms reach and next door to activist influentals? This will take some doing. Each of the contributions points to plausible next steps. Many if not all of the contributions mention that understanding and initiating system changes takes time. How are future generations of community psychologists provided with the supportive environments to tune into the multi year processes of gaining trust and collaboratively creating and understanding systemic change? How will future graduate training give new community psychologists the know how to engage in these enterprises? How can graduate training sanction participation in multi year expeditions without major personal costs to the new and potentially vulnerable members of SCRA? One encouraging sign is the cumulative impact of the array of multiple methods employed to initiate and evaluate system changes. This is impressive. How will new members of SCRA have opportunities to realize and maybe try out multiple methods? Are our training programs equipped to teach and illustrate the benefits of comparative knowledge from varied places and different assumptions? Another positive sign is that throughout the papers there is a silent chorus that what goes on within a social system can not be separated from the multiple contexts affecting the participants and their system. This is a basic premise that is present in each of the contributions. Historical contributions as presented by Christens and colleagues affirm that we do have persons in times past who struck the same chords and were prescient to anticipate what we are struggling with today. We may not have the occasion every day to realize that Dewey, Foucault, Freire, Mills, Geertz, Habermas, Marcuse outside our field and Barker and Bronfenbrenner close to our field as well as pioneers in system dynamics modeling such as Forrester and Checkland are all ‘‘with us’’ in our ecological and systems expeditions and adventures. So historical analyses and inquiry are sources of support and validation as well as a source of caveats that can compel us not to be trapped by too strict a professional, elitist idea of what we are about. J. G. Kelly (&) Research Associate, University of California, Davis, CA 956186747, USA e-mail: jgkjazz@sbcglobal.net