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Global Learning Festival 2012 - Community Life Competence
A perspective from Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Day One started with a discussion on how different facilitators work, how do they inspire and encourage their communities to identify areas of concern and take action. The twin-premise behind this exercise was that not only can we learn from one another’s work, but new insights can also strengthen and add to CLC approach. Thus, it laid clear the fact that CLC approach is not etched in stone, but it is a dynamic one that is open to changes and new possibilities.
One: Prioritization of issues through a thorough needs-assessment study with the community
Two: Concurrent groups working on different issues simultaneously with links to different sources of funding and support
Three: Choosing to address all issues while maintaining sharper focus on the issue the community wants to focus on
Four: Using the community’s priority issue as the entry point to address larger concerns.
Such a consideration of diverse approaches arises because of foregrounding community’s knowledge about what is important to them. Moreover, such a process will be possible only if we Stimulate the discussion, Appreciate their strengths, Listen to their voices even when they say things that are contrary to what we would like to hear, and work together as a Team.
The principle of relating as human beings was expanded upon by Jean-Louis Lamboray and Indumathi Ravi Shankar. As evidenced in my introduction above, though this seems simple, it is not an easy process for many of us. As Rituu Nanda has observed, a participant who works in the private sector shared, “I had forgotten that I was a human being in corporate settings where we are asked to keep our personal aspect aside.”
One of the key exercises that came out of Day One was to examine how differently we would work with communities if we had to foreground our humanity and prioritize the communities’ interests. And how do we act when these come in conflict with the demands of the current modes of functioning? As an illustration of this, Rituu has documented the work done by her group during the exercise. They analyzed the different possible responses when a community’s priorities are at odds with those of the donor agencies’, and they came up with four possibilities:
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