Rapaire said:
who fail to do anything when they could or who are prevented from doing something.

McGrath of Harlow said:
There are ways of doing social work which actually do help people deal with difficult circumstances, and which make it much less likely for vulnerable people - children, old people, disabled people - to be hurt or worse. But increasingly those ways of working have been marginalised and abandoned

jacqui.c said:
try and be aware of problems that might be occurring in our own communities... find some way of making people in general more aware of and feel more responsible for what is happening in their own neighbourhoods.

HOW? I'm not asking why. I don't need to know there's divine justice or payback or even healing. Responsibility's a given: we're all in this together and we really are doing this to our collective self (adults and babies and songbirds and algae - send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for me). What I don't know is HOW the **** to do better than we are.

If one's in an agency or a government, where can one find the tools you spoke of, McG? How do you distinguish them from the ineffective ways of working? As a citizen, I can demand that my district, province, and country use the best, but only if we can find them and demonstrate that they're better.

Is there any standard measure of effectiveness authorities can use to identify the most useful ways of working? How can they recognise the best methods to evaluate their departments without interfering too much with the essential tasks their people are doing? When out of our specialty (everyone is, most of the time) how can we find and evaluate the evidence we need to understand our options and make good choices?

Tools, Rapaire, tools for understanding and choosing. How? Where? Which? That's what prevents most of us from doing something: ignorance. Once you've taken a first aid course, you have some idea of how to approach a sick or injured person. What about a sick family or country? What can one person do? Which are the top few most effective things we can do to make our communities more humane?

I've already begun a lot of changes to make myself a better citizen in the community of species (David Suzuki's Nature Challenge gives simple high-priority ways to start or continue) but I'm still looking for where to start at practicing the skills of making my human communities better (while keeping most of my evenings for my family). I am sure there are things I could be doing to prevent these tragedies. What are they? Help me to help!