Community Development (CD) is, in short, about working in community organizations to help people. Here's a longer definition:
The purpose of Community Development is to improve aspects of life in communities using the following methods:
• It develops flexible systems for Iidentifying needs, focussing direction, and strengthening community participation.
• It draws on existing human and material resources in the community.
• It improves self-help and social support.
Community development usually refers to local communities, although people in urban societies might not know each other. CD work often takes the form of projects with completion goals, although some programs are ongoing. Almost all CD organizations are non-profits.
It usually involves another field of expertise such as education, agriculture, engineering (e.g. water projects), business development, community sport, or housing.
CD workers can be civic leaders, employees and volunteers in community organizations, ordinary citizens, or professionals. They usually:
raise issues and develop particular goals
build networks of a wide range of local people, whether they are informal networks or formal community organizations
recruit staff, many of whom are often voluntary
raise any necessary funds from with the community, and,
empower people to address and resolve problems.
The term "community development" is applied to both its practice and its study as an academic discipline.
The parameters of your organization (what sort of things you do and don't do), and
Needs assessment of the target population (Who are they? What do they need?)
Providing emergency relief is sometimes the first stage. For example, after the crisis in East Timor, many people needed food and shelter urgently. Providing it was emergency relief. The long term task of rebuilding afterwards was quite a different process, with very different skills. Consequently, we haven't covered emergency relief in this course.
Stage 1: Describe the community you will be going to.
Presuming you have made a decision to go ahead, you will need to describe the main features of your community to identify factors that will determine the success of your program. The main features are:
Its ethnicity (white Australian, Scottish, Balinese, Italian, Cantonese, etc.)
Socio-economic status: upper middle class, landless peasants, traditional ruling class, small traders, factory workers, refugees, etc.
Predominant institutions: Local government, churches, mosques, schools, commercial enterprises, extended families, etc.
Cultural factors: factors of religion, worldview, history, sociology, etc. You might need to describe them ethnographically and its related worldview issues. Describe your initial contact with the people, and record their stories.
Legal and regulatory factors: There may be legal restrictions of what you can do, or you may need permits for some kinds of activities. You will also need to see if legal factors create opportunities, such as various kinds of funding.
Identify any other key issues that will determine how you plan the program, for example:
Are there contextualization issues?
What social structures affect your strategy? Do you need to describe them?
What dynamics of personal relationships come into play with local people? With team members?
What communication strategies are appropriate?
Are there personnel challenges in having the right people?
Are there logistical challenges in locating people on site and providing adequate resources?
Stage 2: Consultation
This stage is much more about listening and understanding than helping anyone. Consultation includes describing exactly the need that you want to address. You'll need to identify the main stakeholders, establish personal networks of key people, and gain their support. Meet key local people to hear and understand their viewpoint:
their stories and concerns
factors affecting their view of the problem and its solution
their local decision-making processes, which may be formal (government and organizational) or informal, dependent on the goodwill of key people in local personal networks
any information you need for decision-making (local conditions, local resources, etc.)
relations between different stakeholder groups
their motives.
When they have described how they see the particular need you want to address, it is your role to adjust your understanding of it. In intercultural situations, their logic might not always make sense to you; for example social, worldview, or historical factors may affect their approach in ways that you don't yet understand.
As long as you don't offend anyone, you may also be able to ask questions that introduce new ideas:
Get preliminary response to new ideas on possible solutions; suggest possible approaches and see if people are receptive
begin dialog
pass views of different stakeholders on to each other
Stage 3: Review similar programs
Evaluate similar programs in light of your context. What lessons are relevant for your situation? What other possible approaches are there? You might need to use a case studyapproach to assess other people's experience.
Stage 4: Planning
You need a solid plan. Even if you have to change it later on, you'll still do much better if you have thought through beforehand what you want to do. Your consultation has probably already started to firm up into a plan, what you will and won't be able to do.
Define in detail what you want to do. Plan your approach, and write it down in clear steps with a culturally attuned rationale. This sounds simple, but it probably isn't.
Stage 5: Pilot program (optional)
In a larger project, you should run a pilot program to iron any glitches out of your plan while it is small enough to fix easily. If the results are not very encouraging, you might even need to run a second pilot project to see if the difficulties are resolved.
Stage 6: Implementation
The first part of implementation is to inform people in the target population about the new techniques or approaches. It may include:
discussions with senior decision-makers
visiting local people
holding neighborhood groups
using mass media and/or
formal instruction
You will find that consultation plays a continuing role in what you and you will have to process feedback from implementation and make any necessary changes. In reality, you are continually evaluating it as you go. Expect factors to arise that you could not have foreseen. While it may be frustrating, expect to make mid-course changes in direction based on what you learn and the response you get.
Stage 7: Evaluate the program
Apply the program evaluation accoriding to you plan. Although a periodical review or final program evaluation are distinct, they probably will not bring any surprises if you have been monitoring it as you go. Lots of program evaluation approaches are possible and you need to devise one that will suit your context.
Stage 8: Handover to local people
In brief, this stage will be much easier if you started with a plan to hand over the program to locals. If you get to the end of your time and haven't started handing over, it's possibly too late and the pains are usually enormous. Locals have become dependent on your funding and expertise, and normally feel that they cannot continue without it. You will need to go through a whole new project cycle with this goal in mind.
In your handover, you may find it wise to include some kind of continued informal contact afterward, if only to keep up the personal relationships and prevent people from feeling abandoned.
Different Models
In many ways, the process isn't a simple step-by step process, because you have to think about what you will do later when you do the earlier steps. Notice that many of these models use different ideas of stages.
Four stages
Here's a simple one that we've often used:
1
2
3
4
Inquiry and go/no-go decision
Community learning phase: forming a network of contacts, learning local culture
Implementation with periodic evaluations and in-course changes
Hand over to local people and prepare to leave
Cumulative
Here's another that shows that the stages (conceived in this way) tend to be cumulative. Each one continues during all following stages:
1
2
3
4
Consultation
Consultation
Consultation
Consultation
Planning
Planning and review
Planning and review
Implementation
Implementation
Evaluation
Cycle
In this next view, community development is seen as a cycle that repeats again and again.
1. Consult
4. Evaluate
2. Plan
3. Implement
Spiral
Community development is also a series of cycles that make up a spiral:
1. Emergency relief
2. Pilot program
3. Main program
4. Hand over to local people and prepare to leave
Emergent understanding
This next model emphasizes emergent understanding through consultation. With increasing common experience and consultation, both parties come closer, although their views seldom completely converge:
Start Community Development worker and local people have widely different conceptions of the problem and its solution.
Middle Consultation and adaptation resulting in emergent understandings.
End Community Development worker and local people generally agree on their conceptions of the problem and its resolution.
Reviewed goals
This model shows that you are continually looking at your goals in a new light as you understand the situation better.
Ideas of goals are very culturally determined. Some cultures are very rigid in using their goals to attempt to predetermine results. Others can rationalize anything to fit the goals.
It's very difficult to predict exactly where a project will end up as you will probably learn so much on the way. And even if the actual program turns out exactly as you planned it, it won't look all that much the same because:
You've better understood the purpose of the program and the best way to achieve it.
The nitty-gritty of reality is usually quite different from your idealized plan
The personalities of dominant individuals color your view of the program.
Proactive, reactive, or interactive
You can also look at community development as tending to be either proactive, reactive, or interactive.
Proactive
You or your organization has identified a need in a particular community and sets out to do something about it, even if the local people don't see the need. The kind of help is largely predetermined. This is often the case with government programs that are predominantly about implementing policy initiatives. It is also common among organizations that have specific goals, specific views on the nature of the problem, and specific modus operandi on how the problem will be faced. These programs generally take a long time to change attitudes through consultation and community education.
For example, a community might not think that it needs help if they see something as normal. This includes communal practices that perpetuate poverty, drunkenness, violence, unproductive agricultural practices, medical practices, and high infant mortality rates.
Reactive
You are responding to a fairly obvious problem that requires very little diagnosis. This is usually the case in disasters where people are homeless, hungry, unemployed, sick, or wounded. That is, the kind of help you will give (in the shorter term at least) is largely decided for you, and the local community urgently feels the need for help.
Interactive
In this case, the community development organization and the local community need considerable dialogue to come to a shared understanding of the nature of the problem and the way to remedy it. During the dialogue, the community development organization might change its view of the need and how it wants to address that need. This is particularly the case where cultural factors are important and the development program is long-term.
The stage of the organization
Consider the new organization. It's most likely a lone founder working as a volunteer, supported by a small group of friends. Structures are fairly informal and there aren't many rules. The projects also tend to be small and interpersonal.
Later on, the growing organization might have different kinds of relationships with government (e.g. registration), so they need to be better organized with formal rules, business plans and budgets. The CEO is now responsible to a board, and there is a clearer idea of core business.
The large organization has a professional paid staff and a more regulated institutional structure, usually with a clear public image and a wider constituency. It has the capacity to take on larger projects and run them in a more business-like way.
In CD the differences are:
staffing arrangements (level of professionalization)
government relationships (larger organizations usually have more ties to government.)
size of projects, including long term projects
rules on what to do or not do (mainly policies and and procedures)
Larger organizations are not necessarily very institutional at grass-roots level, and can be very good at keeping a personal touch. In fact, some larger organizations are more like a large network of micro-organizations so they have some characteristics of both new and large organizations.
Parallel
During most projects, the person in charge has a number of things going on at once. They might be quite separate from each other, even if they are all essential to achieving the same project outcome.
In other words, the person in charge needs to keep track of a range of simultaneous activities.
Here's a diagram (called a Gantt chart) of a 9-week project, with a row for each activity. You'll notice that more than one kind of activity is usually going on at one time and that some activities must end before others can start:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Managing change
The main drawback with innovations in aspects of traditional lifestyles is that those people often don't accept new ideas very easily. It takes much more time and patience than can be described briefly here. Give people time to change their thinking; your community education period might be longer than you think, especially if people must re-consider worldview issues and process communication static. Some kinds of change take generations rather than months or years.
First stage
The first stage of change management has already been done in consultation. People had time to digest new ideas, ask questions, consider implications, and make the ideas their own. By the time the consultation is finished, the final idea might already sound more like theirs than yours.
Identify accurately the changes that you want to make
Sounds obvious, and you'll probably change the list as you implement the changes and understand them better. In community development (CD), they may include, for example, leadership structures and skills, new ways of thinking, wealth of some kind, habits and preferences, beliefs, and values.
Have a simple, clear message
In an intercultural situation, there may be lots of communication static (worldview issues, incorrect assumptions) that make your apparently simple message harder to understand than you anticipate. You may also need to dialog and explore implications with them. Consequently, it is essential to choose carefully which points need changing and which you will let go.
If the idea depends on the local people understanding it, a simple but less efficient idea might be better than a technological "magic box". It also has the attraction of being within their local resources. For example, a simple sand-based water filter filled with buckets may be low tech, but it is easy for local people to make and use. As another example, a dentist's drill driven by a bicycle might be more practical than one driven by a motor.
Identify your entry points for change
It will often be the group of community leaders. But not always.
Microcredit usually starts with networks of women.
Some programs start with neighborhood networks, especially in education and health.
Some start with affinity groups, e.g. sports clubs.
Some public education programs might be most effective starting with school children.
Give people a working example
People can be very pragmatic. They want to see it working and see demonstrable benefits. They will be much more likely to believe you If you can show them that other people can do it, and give them a chance to ask questions and evaluate the idea.
For example, we once put a worker in a rural area to use organic fertilizer. The fertilizer was cheap and effective, but he had no samples or demonstration plots, only photographs. People just didn't believe him and wanted to continue using harmful, expensive chemicals.
Consider local cultural factors
What if local people don't believe modern medicine's conception of sickness and treatment and believe that sickness is caused by evil spirits? There are worldview and spiritual issues.
A patient showed up at the clinic saying that she had two evil spirits. One was chasing the other all over her body, making her feel very sick.
Locals use cheap local medicine first and use expensive western medicine only as a last resort, perhaps when it is too late to be effective.
People were quite happy to get modern medicine, and they would hang the bottle of pills over their beds rather than take them. So they found that the medicines didn't help much.
Thinking that medicine was expensive, people would save money by taking doses that were too small to be effective. (They can also overdose in the belief that if a little medicine is good, a lot more must be better.)
Through pure weight of probabilities, the witchdoctor might have a 50% cure rate with his time-honored and widely accepted traditional treatments. Modern medicine seldom gets a 100% cure rate, so the witchdoctor could still point to his own successes and say that he could have cured your failures.
The African chief felt that pills wouldn't be effective because they were tasteless and easy to take. The injection was more painful, so he thought it must do more good.
In many of these cases, doctors felt that had to hospitalize patients or have them come to the clinic daily, just to ensure that patients got the correct treatment.
Use a realistic system of increments
You don't have to change the world overnight. If you implement a program in stages, each stage should be a simple, natural progression from the last. They should make implementation easier for everybody. In fact, they might even be almost invisible to local people.
If you get people impatient for change, (the "change the world overnight" kind of people) you can simply explain that you are on track, and show them your progress according to plan.
On the other hand . . .
Their local way of doing things may actually be superior to your imported system, for example:
Modern practices might be environmentally unsound.
Modern plant cultivars might produce more food, but they might also have less nutrients, poorer flavor and fewer beneficial by-products.
Some key ideas
Structural disadvantage and inequality means that, in a particular community, some kinds of people are normally disadvantaged, for example, people of some other races, people who don�t speak English, old people, the disabled, and some people in lower socio-economic groups.
Social justice means that action should be taken to correct current injustices.
Human rights is actually a legal term for rights that are usually defined in law. Some countries have a Bill of Rights for their citizens, and the United Nations also has statements of basic human rights. However, people often use the term differently. It is an ethical question whether or not people should have certain rights. People also use the term "human rights" very loosely in order to demand something they want, regardless of whether or not they actually have that right.
Locality development work refers to development in a specific locality. The kind will tend to depend on the specific local need.
Personal and public processes. The political process of cultural change can be either personal or public:
Personal processes refer to the circumstances of individuals. Changes are made on a case by case basis through individual advocacy, and their personal situations are usually kept private.
The public political process refers to actions to improve the lives of a whole class of people with a common problem through political lobbying. This kind of advocacy may require public debate in which the whole community may participate.
Social action refers to public activities to correct some wrong. It may be by lobbying to the government to take actions, or by doing something yourself to help people.
Advocacy is helping people who cannot help themselves by navigating a system for them. They may have disabilities, be isolated, or be unable to understand the system. It can be individual (helping individuals) or system (lobbying to government.)
Brokering connections between communities and systems is most helpful when government and other service providers ignore the needs of particular communities. Community development workers consult local people by discussing their needs and then presenting them to government and service providers.
Needs analysis. Community development workers normally analyze the needs of specific communities. In this kind of research, they often survey people, hold discussion groups, observe needs in the community and collect any useful statistical information. The needs are often different from what they appear to be, and the causes are often very difficult to identify. In fact, even the definition of need is quite difficult.
Process means the kind of stages one goes through when experiencing a change. The outcome is the end result. But in another sense, process is a kind of very valuable outcome. At the end of the process, people need to be able to look back and see how they have changed, so they know what they have changed into and why. Many changes also require people to change their sense of identity.
Mutuality. In this change process, imposing changes from outside is usually disastrous; people naturally feel resentful and rebel. Besides, an imposed solution is usually inappropriate, as it does not suit local perceptions of needs or how to meet those needs.
It is usually much more productive to respect and value local knowledge and skills and work within those parameters. In other words, they also bring something valuable into the change process, as they normally understand some essential aspects of when they want and how to change better than an outsider. In that sense community development is based on mutuality.
Different cultural experiences
Different people in the same community can have quite different experiences of the same culture. For example, you'd experience the same culture quite differently:
if you had been born the son of Italian immigrants in a working class area, or
if you worked as a lawyer in a high prestige suburb.
People also interpret their culture according to their individual pasts. In the examples above, you would probably have a past that was coloured by:
Italian family traditions, growing up in a working class area. The son's experience might also be very different from a daughter's experience.
Doing well at school and doing law at university. Perhaps a wealthier background, but could have come from a working class background and learned how to adjust to an upper middle class culture.
How would these people experience the same culture differently:
a 15 year old homeless single mother?
a severely disabled person?
a professional actor?
a shift worker in a mine?
a shop assistant?
the CEO of a large corporation?
You could easily think of a dozen examples of different kinds of people in the same culture with different pasts and different experiences of the same culture.
Interdisciplinary roles
Comunity Development normally involves another area of expertise such as:
Health, especially remote and community health
Education and training
Microcredit
Agriculture
Building and infrastructure development
Community services
Rehabilitation
Entrepreneurial skills and small business development
Disaster recovery
Environmental studies
Project management and logistics
Engineering, especially water and sanitation projects and appropriate technology.*
_____________
*Appropriate Technology is simplified technology that local people can understand, can make themselves or afford to buy, can maintain themselves, and can use with minimal training. It may not be as efficient as the higher tech version but it may be more appropriate in developing countries.
A bicycle-powered dentist's drill can drill teeth as well as its high tech counterpart, but can run without electricity, is fairly portable, and costs much less to buy.
Powerlessness and empowerment
A mindset of powerlessness is most difficult to understand if you aren't powerless. It leads people to accept an unfair lot in life. The symptoms of powerlessness include:
People feel like victims. ("It's not fair but we can't do anything about it.")
People believe that they cannot influence "the system", which usually means that they don't know how decisions are made and implemented. ("The politicians and bureaucrats don't listen to us." "There's nothing we can do about it.")
People accept their powerlessness, and might even believe it should not change. That is, they become acculturated to their position. ("Everybody in our ethnic group is a slave. Always has been, always will be. We couldn't be anything else.")
People are controlled by others who deprive them of rights ("The old men make all the decisions. We women just do as we are told.)
People have no knowledge of their rights. Or they might know their rights but have no way of getting them.
Powerlessness is only perceived in some cultures; people simply need to be taught their rights and their role in the decision-making system. But powerlessness is real in some cultures, where marginalized people are deliberately kept in place by government law, bureaucrats, large companies, traditional law, or social stigma.
Empowerment is a prominent theme in modern community development. In many cases, CD workers help people who don't have the power to help themselves. Empowerment means that people can make their own decisions for the betterment of their own lives. It implies that they have their own ideas about what is good for them and have knowledge and skills that will help them work toward it. The term sometimes has emotional overtones, such as confidence, autonomy and freedom. Empowerment often has a connotation of freedom from oppression, although in many cases, the oppression is the result of culture or unwillingness to change, rather than any kind of oppressor.
Empowerment has several facets:
CD workers consider the views and perspectives of local people in interpreting problems and resolving them.
Local people are empowered to address and resolve problems, and to have a sense of ownership of the program.
CD encourages local people to take responsibility and leadership for the program.
CD seeks to hand programs over to local leaders so they will bring ongoing benefit to the local community
Cultural poverty
Cultural poverty means that people can be acculturated to practices that keep them poor. (It does not mean that they have no culture.) Even if you offer a solution to people's problems, they might culturally find it difficult to accept.
In other words, disadvantage is part of their culture. Look at these examples:
If people are used to living in a rubbish tip, they have trouble adapting to living in a house.
If a group of people are used to being abused, they think that being abused is normal.
If a group of people are used to using physical violence to solve problems, they won't be able to navigate a system that requires polite negotiation.
If a group of people are used to living on credit card debt, they think that being debt-free is unrealistic and that living without instant credit is a form of hardship.
If a group of people normally drink large amounts of alcohol, they think that alcohol problems are normal and people are odd if they don't drink.
If a group of people are normally long-term unemployed, they become unemployable because they can't show up at work on time or be told what to do by a boss.
The implications of cultural poverty for you are:
Your client may be blind to his/her problem.
Your client might not believe you.
If the client sees you as culturally different, they may think that there is a catch to getting help.
Your client may have difficulty believing that his/her lifestyle could be better.
Your client might have trouble adjusting to a different lifestyle, and risks reverting back to the former lifestyle.
Cultural poverty is not easily resolved, and is one of the major challenges of community development. In the past, one approach was to extract individuals from their communities and lead them through a cultural change out of poverty. In community services, it is still a good approach to create change in individuals. It is more difficult to instigate change in families, especially large extended families.
The current trend in community development is to work with whole communities. In practice, however, it is more likely to be smaller programs that touch certain networks in the community that are willing to accept change. It is quite productive to make small targeted changes that produce considerable benefit. in the short term. However, changing the culture of whole communities usually takes decades or generations.
The generational timeframe
Many kinds of community development are very long term, because it takes generational change to be most effective.
In other words, expect only a relatively small amount of short-term incremental change. Most of the major change will occur in the next generation, so working with larger populations of children is essential. In this kind of scenario, ten years is a short program. If a generation is thirty years, then a full program takes about thirty years.
In fact, short-term help can be counterproductive in these circumstances. People get disillusioned with people who come, make promises, do something that might help a few people, then leave. This doesn’t create long-term change.
Some things take long-term culture change. Consider, for example, a person who, like all his family and friends, had lived his whole life in a hut made of rubbish on the edge of a rubbish tip. Living in a basic house won't come naturally. It could easily take a generation for them to become accustomed to living in a house and looking after it. As another example, consider a person who, like all his family and friends, had been a debt-laborer. His wages did not cover the interest on his debts to his employer, so he was for most practical purposes a slave. For people in a community like this, it is a very long term goal for them to be able to make decisions, take initiative, get educated, and use money.
What makes it work?
It needs parental and community support to work.
It needs some kind of immediate benefit to all parties involved.
It needs to create new opportunities for the future.
It needs to create new aspirations and realistic pathways for the younger generation.
This kind of project can wind down if it does not develop local leadership. In general, it is wiser to expect to give long-term support. In any case, change in the environment is inevitable, and the program will probably evolve.
If your programs depend on stable government policy, and you should consider long-term effects. What expectations are you creating? Consider especially the people at grass roots level, as these might last longer than a particular government policy. Will government policy be changed at the next election?
The current advice is to put long-term objectives into your strategy, but write your concrete plans in periods of no more than five years. You can't normally plan implementation in generational timeframes. You'll probably need five years to identify any progress toward generational goals.
The role of education
This kind of longer-term change is probably more effective when it is brought about by education.
The first wave might get a basic primary school education, but most children might choose to go onto traditional occupations of their parents (farmers, small traders, traditional crafts).
Most of the children in the second wave do a full junior high school education, from which many do a vocational qualification.
Children in the third wave have the opportunity for a full high school education, with the possibility of higher education.
If there is a fourth wave, the majority of students achieve a full high school education, with relatively easy access to subsequent higher education.
In each of the first three waves, only a small group go further. They tend to be either the educational or the social elite. Some might act as role models. They are to some extent the guinea-pigs for higher programs, but also prove to children and parents in future waves that it is possible for people of that group to do further education.
The underlying subtext is to accommodate socio-cultural change, to be manifest in several ways:
Raise employment aspirations.
Adapt to a higher standard of living and social class.
Raise their aspirations for their children.
Reduce their powerlessness.
Participate in regional and national discussions.
Simple and complex projects
Simple projects
Complex projects
Simple projects have very few risks because there is not much to go wrong. They tend to have the following characteristics:
They are done in your own location, culture and socio-economic group.
They use volunteers working in their spare time.
They don't require specialist expertise.
They are informally organized and don't need a lot of planning, just the willingness to do something helpful.
They are not institutional.
They are small and focused.
They have an end date.
They require very minimal finances, sometimes none at all. If they do need money, it is a small amount contributed by the volunteers.
The people doing them often don't think of what they do as projects (even though they are), just opportunities to get something done.
Complex projects tend to have the following characteristics, all of which are also risk factors:
They are done in a different location and perhaps multiple locations.
They are done in a different culture and socio-economic group.
They are done across a language barrier.
They are done in another country, and might require liaison with a foreign government.
They are institutional rather than interpersonal.
They use paid staff.
They either don't have an end date or are handed over to a local organization.
They lack link people.
The require specialist expertise (e.g. health, ethno-education, agriculture, micro-credit, appropriate technology, entrepreneurship).
They depend on being able to sell a locally-made product in a market somewhere else at a price that will at least cover costs.
They depend on gifts but are long-term and low-profile. (It can be hard to attract gifts.)
They have a research component, for example, testing an idea when you don't know for sure whether it will work).
They have contracted government funding tied to rigid performance indicators.
As an academic project
You can do community development projects as either original research projects or as professional projects.
A professional project. It is probably simpler to a community development program as a professional project, where you demonstrate that you have the expertise required to fly solo. You don't have to demonstrate a research outcome.
A research project. If your project is also a research project, you will need a "single core issue" that is illustrated and demonstrated in the planning, implementation and evaluation of the project. this will enable you to achieve an original finding of some kind. The topic should normally be limited to that issue so that the research project will be feasible. You cannot describe all relevant issues that may come up. The "single core issue" must reflect the thesis for which you are arguing, and may also be manifest in an hypothesis.
For example, a major project could take one year of full-time study, divided into four stages:
Stage 1: Consultation and background research, learning about your community, and deciding the best kind of project for the needs you face.
Stage 2: Detailed planning and preparation.
Stage 3: Implementing the program.
Stage 4: Evaluation and write-up of the project for submission.
Civil war
Here's another nearly impossible task.
A civil war had devastated the local population. Most people had lost relatives and been tortured or physically abused in some way. A community worker was given the task of helping the communities to heal, and developed this approach. The theory is remarkably simple but the practice is a little more complex.
He visited the villages in his area to:
encourage them to feel safe from attack,
get people to tell their stories,
get them to start healing from their past,
get them to move on, and
make a time to come back.
It obviously took people more than one visit to go through these simple steps, because it was an emotional journey as much as anything. After each visit, it was essential to make a time to come back (e.g. next month), and then come back as promised. This maintained his credibility as a trustworthy person who would actually give help.
The scars were almost certainly deep, but at the end of the process, people were ready to begin rebuilding and replanting, and establish more normal routines and relationships.
Community health
Several organizations needed to promote health in third-world context.
First case: A refugee camp. The organization gained the services of senior medical students who already had provisional practitioner licenses to prescribe and dispense medication. They then informed community members of a series of locations and times where they would attend every two weeks. This approach was a suitable for the more serious maladies.
Second case: A large settled community with poor health. The organization trained a large team of local people as community health workers in general first aid, basic nutrition, hygiene, and community education. This approach had two very interesting features. Although relatively simple, these skills were enough to alleviate most of the more serious maladies of a large population; poor nutrition and hygeine caused most illness. The other interesting feature is that, to get buy-in, the CD worker put prospective health workers on the health plan that they were to advocate. They bought in when they noticed that their own health improved dramatically.
Third case: the disease was easy to treat. The main challenge was to educate local people. They had their own beliefs on the nature of the disease and what caused it. They didn’t care about early symptoms and didn’t take the medication as prescribed, so many cases got worse. It was difficult to convince people to actually put a pill in their mouths every day and swallow it. If they took medication, patients with advanced cases were healed but were usually left with disfigurements, so their communities usually spurned them.
EON "Edge Of Nowhere"
An NGO noticed that one group of remote ethnic communities had a very high incidence of type two diabetes because they had a very poor diet. In particular, fresh fruit and vegetables were either not available or too expensive for local people to buy.
EON offered a program, but only went into communities that specifically invited them.
The NGO taught primary school-age children to grow vegetables. It was only six weeks from the first planting to the time children ate their own harvest, so the kids had a positive, short term reinforcement. Although parents were supportive and saw the benefits, they were not the target group of the program. Perhaps part of its success was that tasty fruit and vegetables was a novelty.
The garden program was sustainable in the long term. It engendered a view that children should expect to have high quality fruit and vegetables and that they could grow it themselves.
Current practice
It will be your job to keep up operate within a CD framework. This has at least four aspects:
Current ideas in academia:
You might find that mission organizations are usually ahead of universities and government institutions. Examples of particular topics are:
the interrelationships between the individual, the family, the community, and society
social, political and economic contexts
change dynamics
program evaluation
intercultural and cultural issues
contextualization
interdisciplinary aspects
Ethics and values:
The impact of your own values
Social justice, human rights, non-discrimination
Confidentiality
Fundraising and advertising
Working within your areas of expertise
Particular practices:
Case management
Small business loans (micro-credit)
Community education
Community health, etc.
Mindset:
Relating to people and caring what happens to them
"Why am I doing this?"
How communities work
How to start something when your only resources are a network of people in the community.
Showing initiative
The project management cycle:
identify needs
consult
gather resources
implement
review
"What will work and what won't?"
The current CD practices described in Comment and Ausguide will cover most or all of what you need.
