This page sets out to explain the Constellation to others. It is not the answer, but it is an answer. It might help you to understand better who we are and what we do. It might help you to explain who we are and what we do to others. If you think that we should add, change or take out something then please let us know.
The text covers the following topics:
The fundamentals of the Constellation
The Constellation in 2050
The Constellation: our story and our purpose...from AIDS Competence to Community Life Competence
What is SALT?
What is a community?
The fundamentals of the Constellation
The starting point—Local Response
Communities can and do act to respond to the challenges that they face.
The role of the Constellation
The Constellation stimulates communities to take action, to learn systematically from their experiences and to learn from the experiences of their peers.
The idea of Community Life Competence
The Constellation uses the term (Community) Life Competent to describe a community that is able to deal with the challenges that they face as part of their normal way of life.
The Community Life Competence process (CLCP)
The Community Life Competence process (CLCP) is a process that a community can use to progress towards Community Life Competence.
The Constellation’s way of working
Our energy for change comes from regular immersion into community experience. When we ask appreciative questions, we discover and reveal strengths which communities themselves might not realise. We in turn are inspired to transfer the experience into our own contexts: at work, in our social and family lives. We call SALT our mode of interaction with communities: Stimulate Appreciate, Learn, and Transfer. SALT is at the heart of the Constellation.
Our dream for the Constellation in 2050
This is the Constellation
The Constellation is made up of communities that aim for life competence through the practice of SALT
…and this is our dream for the Constellation in 2050
We will live in a world where communities take action based on their strengths to realise their dream. They inspire others when they connect to learn and to share and for mutual support.
…and this is the role of Constellation Support Teams
Constellation Support Teams develop and nurture the capacity to facilitate community discussion, reflection, learning and action. We accompany communities on their journey to their dream. We connect local responses around the world.
The Constellation: our story and our purpose
From AIDS Competence to Community Life Competence
Every community has the capacity to envision, to act and to adapt. This is our core belief, and it comes from experience.
Our discovery of human capacity started with AIDS. For two decades, large scale progress on AIDS was limited to northern Thailand, Uganda and Brazil. These settings share one distinctive characteristic: people took ownership of the issue and of the response to HIV and AIDS.
To date, global policy has not acted upon this lesson.We founded the Constellation to respond to this shortcoming. We envision a world where AIDS competence spreads faster than HIV. AIDS Competence means that together we live to our potential because we act from strength to acknowledge the reality of HIV and AIDS, to address vulnerability and risks, to learn-and-share with others, to assess our progress and to adapt. We recognise that the mobilization of information, technology and money is necessary, but we also recognise that it is not enough. Consequently we offer to stimulate and to connect local responses to HIV.
AIDS is not the only threat to our lives. Diseases, new and old, have similar or greater (potential) impact. Climate change threatens the planet. The policy responses to address those global concerns target people with information, money and technology. However, the solution to these issues lies primarily in our individual behavior. The current programs are needed to save energy, to address poverty, to modulate fertility and migration, to prepare for pandemics, to address drug use, alcoholism, obesity, traffic accidents, suicides, and to live in peace. However they are not enough, because they do not place sufficient emphasis on local ownership of the issue. Local ownership enables individual behavior change to take place and to be sustained in a supportive environment.
This is why the Constellation offers to stimulate and to accompany Community Life Competence. While the Constellation started with offering the AIDS Competence process, groups have seen its relevance and invited us to apply it to help address malaria, diabetes, the avian flu, human pandemic preparedness. To respond to any life threat, communities go through a similar process: they build their own dream, they face reality; they care for those affected; they address risk and vulnerability; they assess change, learn and adapt; they mobilize their own resources first, while mobilizing external resources as and when needed. The Constellation facilitates the formation of SALT teams that accompany and link communities.
As human beings, the choice is ours. We can remain the passive targets of interventions or we can use our own strengths to envision, to think, to discuss, to act and to adapt.
What is SALT?
We use the acronym SALT to refer to how we work with communities:
Stimulate
Appreciate
Learn
Transfer
SALT is at the heart of the Constellation.
Our energy for change comes from our regular immersion into community experience, at home and elsewhere. When we ask appreciative questions, we discover and reveal strengths which communities themselves might not realize. We in turn are inspired to transfer the experience into our own contexts: at work, in our social and family lives.
What is a community?
Community is a word that has come to mean different things to different people.
And the danger is that it becomes so many things to so many different people, that the word itself means nothing.
The idea of community sits at the heart of the Constellation. And so we should take care to make clear what it means to us.
At its most broad, a community is nothing more than a group that shares 'something'.
At its weakest, the group may share nothing more than a physical location (perhaps, a commuter town outside a large city).
At its strongest, the individuals in the group may devote their lives to a shared idea and to each other (for example, a religious community).
And between these two extremes there is an infinite range of possibilities for sharing.
If we accept this idea, we can suggest that communities evolve as the extent to which they share broadens and deepens.
The first stage in this evolution is the recognition of a shared interest.
This shared interest could be based around location, but it does not have to be. So the dormitory town could perhaps recognise that it needs a better bus service to the large town where lots of people work.
But the community could be based around an enthusiasm for singing and the people who make up that community could be made up of people from a range of 'physical' communities.
The next step in the progression of the community is the recognition of a shared objective.
So when a group goes beyond complaining that the bus service to the nearest town is dreadful and they decide that they are going to do something about it, they have a shared objective.
(In some countries perhaps we would notice the change when people stop saying, "Somebody should do something about that dreadful bus service!" and start to say, "We are going to do something about that dreadful bus service!")
And the third step is shared action. The consequence of a shared objective is naturally shared action. And shared action is Local Response.
The role of the Constellation is to stimulate communities to move along the path from shared interest to shared objective to shared action.
The Community Life Competence process is the tool that communities use to do that. Since we work only by invitation, this means that there is at least one member of the community that sees the benefit of moving along this path.