Preparing for 2070: Reflections from the Journal of Community Psychology's initial decade: Pathways to community psychology's continuing maturation.

This virtual monograph celebrates the 50 th anniversary of the Journal of Community Psychology (JoCP) by reprinting selected commentaries and peer-reviewed papers from JoCP's initial decade. Selected articles focused on the originating goals and priorities of the discipline of community psychology. Each article is followed by reflections. The monograph final section challenges contemporary discipline leaders to identify goals for the coming decades and milestones for measuring progress in their achievement.

Preparing for the 2070s: Reflections from the Journal of Community Psychology's initial decade: Pathways to Community Psychology's continuing maturation.

This commentary introduces a virtual monograph that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Community Psychology. The commentary focuses on originating goals of the discipline and pathways taken in their pursuit and change. The monograph challenges current leaders to define pathways for the next 50 years.

Community psychology's origin and destination: Alternative pathways to the discipline's future.

A review of the Journal's nearly five decades of publications revealed an early commentary entitled "Common sense Community Psychology" (Thorne, 1974) reflecting on early decisions about the discipline's professional identity and interactions with targeted communities of color and need stimulated this commentary. Considered are ways we distinguished ourselves from our parent, clinical psychology, and its focus on emotional and behavioral disorder treated through psychotherapeutic interventions. Thorne's examination of alternative pathways that the discipline could have followed are considered relative to current challenges confronting communities of color and need.

Sense of community, pathway to, or bridge from alienation?

Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC) represents a formative conceptual offering of Community Psychology to the social sciences. Nearly five decades ago, PSOC offered a window into the influence of ecological factors to understanding the emotional and behavioral well-being of members of disenfranchised and underserved segments of the population, especially members of minority and low-income subgroups. Our discipline's founders viewed PSOC as one promising vehicle for pursuing the desired paradigmatic shift from individual to systemically focused interventions to achieve intended outcomes of the emerging community mental health movement. This Commentary reflects the authors' shared thoughts to the adoption of PSOC by conservative spokespersons to explain the resistance of some to the diversification of the population and growing voice of progressive advocates.

Understanding Sarason's concepts of school cultures and change: joining a community in school improvement efforts.

This paper describes an evolving transformative partnership between a large comprehensive university, an urban school system and a predominantly African-American, low-income neighborhood. The partnership's originating intent was to apply an array of university, civic and local resources to improve the academic performance of a neighborhood's schools and the health, welfare and economic well-being of its residents. The extent to which that partnership would precipitate transactional (Sameroff and Fiese, Handbook of early childhood intervention, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 119-149 in 1990) synergies among the partners was unanticipated; the long-term implications for each of the partners of such unfamiliar interactional processes remain unclear but are being systematically monitored over time. Evident at this point, however, it that a process has been initiated that has impacted how the university community, the local public school system, city government and the target neighborhood relate to each other, collaborate with each other and are changing each other. The pace of that process has varied over the years and challenged each partners' expectations and assumptions about the nature and consequences of their involvement. With time and perseverance, however, it appears that all are moving toward a sense of mutual learning and trust and toward extending to each other the benefit of the doubt. This paper discusses the evolution of that process and its implications for university-school-community collaborations.