European Community Psychology Association (ECPA)
www.ecpa-online.eu
The European Community Psychology Association (ECPA) keep together researchers,
activists and expert connected with nationals and internationals networks and associations
involved in community psychology. ECPA issues and interests are deeply concern with individual
and social change in our globalized world proposing a multi level approach to social and
psychological knowledge and interventions focussing on the interactions among persons and
contests.
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The Vision
Community psychology’s (CP) focus is not based either in the individual or in the community but in
their linkage. CP concerns the relationships of individuals with communities and societies at
intrapsychic, organizational, cultural and political level. By integrating research with action, it seeks
to understand and enhance quality of life for individual, communities and societies.
ECPA is aware that the complexity of social changes and the phenomena of marginalization
and exclusion, opens up new study and intervention perspectives by placing the individuals and
more specifically the citizens at the centre thereof.
ECPA is then proposing a critical psychology which seeks to prevent or reduce the negative
mental health consequences of our societal arrangements by working collaboratively at both
objective and subjective levels with persons, in their everyday community contexts, to increase
their control over their lives through facilitating their competence to bring about social change.
The ultimate aim of most community psychologists is then not only, or even mostly, to research,
understand and document distress but to prevent, reduce or eliminate it by changing the societal
arrangements upon which it is consequent. This requires engaging with the person-in-context,
where ‘person’ signifies subjectivity, where ‘context’ signifies multi level societal factors in
reciprocal interaction over time and where ‘person-in-context’ signifies an irreducible unity with
emergent properties.
ECPA key task is then to come to understand the psycho-social processes through which
inequality and social injustice at the societal level impacts on the individual’s psycho-physiology to
result in bodily processes which result in unhappiness, illness and ultimately risk of premature
death whilst resisting pressure to intervene at the psychological level and working with others to
bring about socio-economic change to reduce societal inequality to ‘delayer’ the social hierarchy
and reduce distance between positions remaining in it.
ECPA underlines that structural and economic interventions, which are generally
implemented when countries face economic crisis, are needed but are not sufficient. CP
underline the need to work with people, by rebuilding their trust, and rekindling interpersonal
and social ties. ECPA gives evidences that policies and intervention based on community
psychology’s values of empowerment, participation and social justice produce more collective
and individual wellbeing than those deriving from predominant neo--‐liberalistic, competition--‐
oriented and consumerist values.
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ECPA Mission
Awareness of, education, training, and research, as well as practical applications, of community
psychology in the general body of psychology.
Critical debate of key issues in community psychology and related issues.
Progressive influence of community psychology on practice and policy.
Personal health, human development and social justice.
Dismantling of disabling societal barriers and psychologically damaging contexts and practices.
Solidarity, collaboration and mutual respect between community psychologists and marginalized,
disempowered or oppressed people.
Social change to nurture and sustain psychological, collective and physical wellbeing.
European Community Psychologists have made significant contributions to the development of
Community Psychology (CP) on stronger theoretical underpinning, have developed innovative
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ECPA Presentation, November 2011, President C: Arcidiacono
theory driven intervention strategies to promote multilevel empowerment and achieved a high level
of networking creating in 1996 ENCP and then the European Community Psychology Association
(ECPA), recently member of EFPA (European Federation of Psychologists’ Association).
ECPA however, need to provide compelling evidence that community psychologists have
the competencies to tackle (with other professionals) today’s complex problems.
ECPA Goals and Instruments
ECPA goals are strongly concern with social transformations and active participation of citizen to their
individual, relational and social wellbeing:
1. CPs work collaboratively to strengthen system, provide cost-effective service, increase access to
resources and optimize quality for individuals, private and governmental organizations, corporations
and community groups.
2. CPs build on existing strengths of people, organisations and communities to create sustainable
change, promoting self- help groups and empowering existing NGO’s and non profit organisations.
3. CPs develop and disseminate strategies such as empowerment training and affective
education for individuals and groups and multidimensional organisational analysis to promote
empowering organisational contexts.
4. CPs use the dynamics of empowerment in order to enhance well being and growth in individuals and
contexts, linking individuals with groups and organisations.
5. CPs are doing and teaching PAR (Participatory- Action –Research) to identify strengths and
problem areas of a local community in an intercultural and ecological perspective; are focusing on
specific tools as need analysis, community profiling, ethnographical and participative observation,
focalized and narrative interviews, visual methods.
6. CPs to promote civic participation and to promote broadly networked community are aware in
team and network building, collective problem solving, future labs, mediation strategies for
handling conflicts among family members and social groups.
7. CPs promote and support both conventional and new forms of civic and political participation, as
well as self--‐help groups using reflexivity, participative methods, so as qualitative and quantitative
methodologies.
When moving from individuals to groups, organisations and communities CP integrate clinical and
community psychology. Self destructive behaviour presents itself in various settings and with
various intentions and degrees of seriousness and Community Psychology (CP) can also provide
Suicide Prevention Programmes learning from the prevention of violence and accidents; by
combining strategic efforts with psychological interventions, community psychologists can assist
local services in preventing suicides and dealing with violence and children abuse.
In our globalized world ECPA will be a knowledge instrument for the de-ideologization,
deconstruction and decolonization of psychology contributing to a critical approach in human
sciences. In this sense its specific perspective is to move on from individualistic and psychologistic
levels of analysis and intervention and acritical collusion with oppressive ways of thinking and
acting in psychology.
ECPA final aims are to bond CP more with associations, social, educational, clinical and
intercultural psychologists, social workers, with family psychotherapists working with migrant
families, interested in overcoming increasing gender, age and cultural divides, and also with
work and organisational psychologists who are involved in retraining unemployed persons and
dealing with continuous organisational changes.
Main Address
European Community Psychology Association
Grasmarkt 105 / 18, B 1000 Brussels, Belgium
President: prof.Serdar M. Degirmencioglu (TR ) Treasurer:
Nicholas Carr (No)
Past President: prof. Caterina Arcidiacono (11-13); President elect . Liz Cunningham (1517). The Executive Committee prof. Maria João Pereira Vargas-Moniz (PT,) Prof. Bruna
Zani (I) Ruben Carrasco (Sp.)
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