A Caring Community

The Caring Community

TRUDIE KIBBE REED is the fifth President of the GREAT Bethune-Cookman University, and first women to serve in this capacity since founding president, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Residing in Daytona Beach, Florida, Dr. Reed maintains a challenging career and still finds the time to provide leadership to struggling congregations. An expert in Transformative Leadership, she is noted for radically transforming systems and organizations, based on the techniques discussed in this book. She is credited with launching the first Master of Science Program in Transformative Leadership, elevating Bethune-Cookman to its current university status in February '07. Dr. Reed pulls from a wealth of experience that includes two presidencies at the college/university level, as well as a member of the General Secretariat of a women's advocacy organization, and over 18 years in various top-tier rankings of The United Methodist Church administration. Dr. Reed serves on the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of The United Methodist Church. Dr. Reed earned her doctoral degree in Adult and Higher Education from Teacher's College, Columbia University in New York, NY.

Support Networks in a Caring Community

The historic Binnenhof, seat of the Dutch government in The Hague, provided the setting (January 1985) for a conference in which participants from eleven countries met to consider the theme: Support networks in a caring community: research and policy, fact and fiction. At the outset, conference leadership - provided by Professors J.M.L. Jonker (The Netherlands) and R.A.B. Leaper (United Kingdom) urged the conferees not to allow their enthusiasm for informal support networks to combine with the pervasive awareness of the failures of welfare states into a simplistic stance of advocacy, with a consequent appeal to politicians to direct state funds accordingly. Legitimate criticisms of the responses of welfare states to the needs of citizens were to be seen as the context for discussion, not the substance of conference deliberations. More specifically, if it is now apparent to many people that governmental assistance of individuals with social needs can lead to an undesirable dependency on the part of increasingly passive citizens, that awareness does not lend logical support to an ideological position that governmental expenditures are pern~c~ous per se - to be replaced as rapidly as possible by a return to reliance on self, family, friends and associations that are developed voluntarily and financed by those who are sufficiently interested.

The Nursing Home, a Caring Community