Building Capacity for Sustainability: Photovoice as a Community Empowerment Tool

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Achieving environmental, cultural, economic and social sustainability requires changing the human condition and building capacity for healthy decision making. Healthy and unhealthy behaviors are influenced by a complicated web of an individual’s attributes and a community’s characteristics. While increasing individuals’ knowledge and positively shaping attitudes is helpful to change human behavior, these indicators are not always enough for the desired outcomes. If environments and social contexts in which people live are not conducive for action, then the desired behavior will less likely occur despite increased knowledge and motivation. Additionally, those with the lived experiences should become active as change agents for shaping environments and social contexts that are most conducive for their specific needs. Engaging the community in the discovery of problems affecting them and the creation of solutions to those problems will facilitate greater potential for positive change. This is a paradigm shift from expert derived needs analyses and problem solutions that traditionally impose upon the community (doing to) rather than involving the community (doing with). Therefore, the likelihood for successful change is random and uncertain. Photovoice is a participatory action research methodology that facilitates community empowerment, builds desire for change, creates solution buy-in and ultimately increases probability for sustainability.

Stream: Cultural Sustainability, Social Sustainability, Other

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Sherer Royce is an Assistant Professor of Health Promotion at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC. Dr. Royce has been at Coastal for five years. Prior to her tenure at CCU, she was the Project Coordinator for the South Carolina American Legacy Empowerment Evaluation Project (SCALE) in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Royce employs the Photovoice methodology in her community assessments and is primarily engaged in research that examines tobacco use prevention, environmental barriers to physical activity and youth empowerment experiences.