Glossary of terms used in the Shifting Sands Initiative:

Active Public Space: how all people, no matter what groups or separates, are engaged in communicating with one another concerning tension and vision as it relates to their community.

When this community function is operating well, there are always conditions present to allow for robust conversation including every element of the community. If community is the tie that binds, this idea is the ongoing act of putting together many threads. 

Aesthetics: (concept, tool, measurable outcome) Artists are often called upon for community celebration, entertainment, or upgrading the look of a place. The skills and tools they employ are not often fully understood and not often used to their fullest potential. Aesthetic and culturally-based expression in various forms has the power to divide, alienate and even enrage. On the flip side, when purposefully and thoughtfully employed this expression and these tools have the capacity to move, enlighten, and connect people.

Asset Based Community Development: An approach to organizing and community development based in the concept of identifying and employing inherent or accrued value (or assets) in individuals, organizations, and communities to make change. Especially in Shifting Sands communities where identity, social cohesion and economic power are lacking, organizing around the community's assets is far more productive as a means to overcome deficiencies. 

Community Assets: Those people, places, relationships, and lore that can conceivably be used in acting to bring about the most equitable functioning of a community.

Community Organizing: Is a value and tool with conceptual underpinnings necessary for success in this work, e.g. Power-how communities work with respect to ownership and voice 

Neighborhood Identity: both the internal and external self-awareness and reputation of a community. This idea attempts to represent the weaving of community pride, wide involvement of a community's denizens and word-of-mouth about what makes a community unique, worth visiting, worth living in, and worth fighting for.

Shifting Sands: A community's changing characteristics of how people relate, where they fall on the socio-economic scale and how people self-identify as a group, as it relates to the influx of new people and cultures, new ideas and agendas, money and capacities.  Whether a community has suddenly become attractive to developers, tourists, new immigrants, transplanted groups, ad infinitum, the resulting flux of group identity, enfranchisement and economic balance represent Shifting Sands. 

Social-Change Action:In the Shifting Sands context, a Social-Change Action represents the holistic voice of the community and addresses social integration, upward economic mobility, and/or neighborhood identity.

Social Integration: (concept, measurable outcome) -The capacity of a community's social fabric to support and to recognize value and potential in difference. As people live together and represent their individual cultural practices, make demands on their community for support, imagine what their community should/can be, this idea represents the degree to which these persons are able contribute in meaningful ways. When social integration is highest, all people are able to comfortably express themselves culturally, can expect and know where to go for support, feel a part of steering the community's direction. 

Take-Away: The tangible and intangible effects, after an action has run its course, experienced by people in the community. What was ‘taken away' and made a part of the community fabric? What was the ongoing benefit? Are new community capacities, relationships, traditions, or institutions created -that (can)function independent of your organization?

Upward Economic Mobility: while class differences may be a reality for a community, the possibility for closing disparities in quality of life or moving across income gaps can be strengthened. All aspects of community life can work in tandem towards making all boats buoyant. Benefits to a community because of rapid development, or the like, should have a holistically positive effect.