Positive Deviance: It’s a simple, yet revolutionary approach to social change, a concept that visiting scholar Arvind Singhal has brought to the Clinton School and its aspiring public servants.
This semester, Singhal returns to the Clinton School for the second consecutive year to teach Dynamics of Social Change, a core course in the Master of Public Service (MPS) degree program, in which he tells students that sustainable, high-yield results are achieved by focusing on what’s right in a community, rather than what’s wrong.
An endowed professor of communication and director of research and outreach for the Sam Donaldson Center for Communication Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), Singhal says the Positive Deviance (PD) approach looks for answers to a community’s problems by examining positive outliers – those whose uncommon behavior overcomes the odds and presents social proof that local, sustainable solutions exist and are readily available to others in the community.
“Here you begin by asking the question: ‘What’s working? And what’s working with the worst-case scenario: the poorest of the poor, who have no access to any special resources?” says Singhal, who holds the title of William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at the Clinton School.
PD has its origins in a 1990 effort to combat childhood malnutrition among impoverished villages in Vietnam. With only six months to implement a program to reverse a decades-long problem, PD founder the late Jerry Sternin had to come up with a radical approach.
Working with Save the Children, Sternin discovered that 64 percent of poor children in four Vietnamese villages selected for intervention were malnourished. But instead of focusing on what was going wrong with those malnourished children, Sternin wondered what the families of the poor, yet well-fed children were doing right. These poor families, who had no special resources but managed to avoid malnutrition, represented Positive Deviants.
Community members found that the positive deviant families were engaging in simple behaviors: adding greens of sweet potato plants and tiny protein-rich shrimp and crabs from paddy fields to meals; actively feeding children so no morsel was wasted; and breaking up the two-meal-a-day norm into three to four smaller meals.
Interestingly, these simple behaviors of the Positive Deviants were uncommon and hidden from public view and, remarkably, the practice of these behaviors did not require any additional resources, meaning they were accessible to all.
Armed with this information, and defying the conventional practice of now “telling” others what to do, Sternin developed a two-week nutrition program focused on “doing.” The families of malnourished children were asked to forage for sweet potato greens, shrimp and crabs. They learned recipes for these foods and were encouraged to feed their children more often.
The results were staggering. From Sternin’s initial discoveries, a two-year pilot project began. By the end, malnutrition decreased 85 percent in the villages where the PD approach was implemented.
“Here was an approach that was so dramatically different, where you begin by focusing on the community’s assets, not their deficits, and where you discover the uncommon solutions that ordinary people are implementing with desirable outcomes and no extra resources,” Singhal says. “The people who are practicing the desired behavior against all odds are living proof that wisdom lurks within the community, and the role of the change agent is to create processes to discover and amplify this local wisdom.”
After becoming a leader in the field of communication and social change, Singhal first learned about PD when he met Sternin by happenstance at a workshop in Durham, New Hampshire in 2004. In the six years since that meeting, Singhal says he has focused 50 percent of his research and writing time on PD.
Since then, Singhal does not miss an opportunity to talk about Positive Deviance in the classes and workshops he conducts at UTEP, at the Clinton School and in dozens of other forums across the world. He has extensively written about the PD approach to help fight the trafficking of girls in Indonesia; reduce maternal and newborn deaths in Pakistan and school dropouts in Argentina; reintegrate child soldiers in Uganda; reduce hospital-acquired infections in U.S. healthcare institutions; and a variety of other topics.
And now he’s incorporating the PD concept into his Clinton School teaching, helping to prepare students for their required public service projects in the school’s MPS program.
“Arvind’s teaching is perfect for our program’s practical approach,” said Clinton School Dean Skip Rutherford. “We are teaching students by sending them out into the field to put their studies into practice, and Positive Deviance is a method that our students can utilize in this work.”
Singhal’s teachings and his international experience have become an asset for Clinton School students as they complete the three required field service projects in the MPS program.
Clinton School student Kimberly Caldwell, who worked this summer to form collaboration among community foundations in Western Cape, South Africa, says Singhal’s lessons prepared her for what was to come in her international work.
“Dr. Singhal’s course was critical to my success working in South Africa,” Caldwell says. “He taught us to be open to working and learning differently from the ways we have been conditioned as middle class Americans. He gave us the space to consider how we can change our approaches and expectations to achieve meaningful results.”
Singhal has coauthored or edited 11 books and over 150 peer-reviewed essays. His last two books deal with Positive Deviance — Inviting Everyone: Healing Healthcare through Positive Deviance (2010) and Protecting Children from Exploitation and Trafficking: Using the Positive Deviance Approach (2009), both discuss how local wisdom and assets can be harnessed to create change from the inside-out.
His research has been supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the U.N. Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), UNICEF and others.
Singhal says the Clinton School’s learning-by-doing approach fits perfectly with his PD work.
“The role of public service is not to come and say, ‘I know best and I’m going to tell you,’ but rather the role of the public servant is to serve, to listen, to understand, to see what resources exist in the community even though they may be hidden,” Singhal says.
And that’s what he’s teaching the Clinton School students – to listen, understand and make a difference.
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