Community leaders’ sensemaking of environmental jolts: Stabilizing and silver lining framing of disruption

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a defining catastrophe for many communities across the world. This study focuses on a small, urban community in the United States at the regional epicenter of the pandemic with high rates of illness, death, financial hardships, and a halt to in-person school and services that lasted over a year. Drawing on institutional theory with a focus on environmental jolts and leadership sensemaking, we conducted a thematic analysis of 20 interviews with cross-sector community leaders, including city officials, school district administrators, directors of community-based organizations, and church leaders to evaluate how they made sense of COVID-19 disruptions and framed their responses to the environmental jolt caused by the pandemic in Spring, 2021. Findings illustrate how leaders framed the jolt as highlighting existing issues, maintained a focus on priorities and purpose pre-dating disruptions, and emphasized opportunities emerging from the crisis. We discuss how leaders engaged in sensemaking both as a form of stabilization, providing a rationale for maintaining pre-pandemic priorities, and as a way to motivate and leverage opportunity through an emphasis on the silver lining of the jolt. We close with implications of these findings for ongoing and future responses to environmental jolts and crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-sector collaboration
• community leadership
• sensemaking
• research- practice partnerships
• institutional
• organizational change

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Lynch School of Education and Human Development and Boston College for their funding and ongoing support for this study. This project received generous funding from the Boston College Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. We also wish to acknowledge our ongoing partnership with community leaders in Gaudet, and in particular thank the school district administrators who lead the Cabinet Initiative and with whom we continue to work closely on community practices to support the youth of Gaudet.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Notes

1. This is a pseudonym for the community we studied.

2. Throughout this paper, we use the term ‘community leaders’ to refer to cross-sector leaders in Gaudet who were members of the Children’s Cabinet, selected based on their engagement in leadership issues in the city. This includes government officials in various agencies, school district administrators, and directors of CBOs, as well as those individuals identified as key local leaders due to their advocacy and engagement with issues in the city.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by Boston College and the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society at Boston College.