The struggle for justice in communities continues

Abstract

As of December 31, 2021, Richard J. Smith and I who currently serve as the editors of the Journal of Community Practice (JCP) will hand over our ScholarOne editor log in passwords to a new editorial team and free up some space in our respective Dropbox folders. While these mundane digital exercises might evoke an abrupt discontinuity, our inner reality shaped by critical consciousness tells us that the struggle for justice in communities continues and both of us will remain active in advancing efforts in that struggle. When we assumed the editorial responsibility for the journal in January of 2018, little did we know how tumultuous the next four years would be for communities across the globe. Nor did we envision how important journals like JCP would be in amplifying community scholarship in pursuit of social, economic, ecological and racial justice. If we have learned anything from the past two years with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that the work of bringing justice to communities will perdure into the foreseeable future. We would like to thank the Association for Community Organization and Social Action (ACOSA), the organizational sponsor of the journal, for allowing us to steward JCP for four short years. When Professor Marie Weil founded the journal, she not only wanted it to be a place to publish about community practice but also to serve as a developmental journal – a space for emerging scholars to write with and about communities. We are grateful that we could continue to extend this vision. When we began our editorship four years ago, we identified a series of goals for the journal. First, we wanted to restructure the Editorial Board to reflect the interdisciplinary and international characteristics of our readership and the larger field of macro practice. Intentionality and extending the invitation were key elements to facilitating those changes. The 32 members of the current Editorial Board reflect the disciplinary, methodological, theoretical and geographic diversity of community practice. We thank all of our Editorial Board members across the globe who graciously accepted the invitation to serve the journal during our editorship. Your expertise and service contributed significantly to the growth and visibility of the journal. Given that JCP prides itself as an interdisciplinary journal grounded in social work, our second goal was to expand our interdisciplinary pool of manuscript reviewers, particularly in areas of emerging interest in the field of community practice and to reviewers familiar with communities or populations new to JCP. During our tenure, we added an additional 300 new JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PRACTICE 2021, VOL. 29, NO. 4, 329–333 https://doi.org/10.1080/10705422.2021.2008708