SALT

Global Learning Festival 2012 - Community Life Competence

A perspective from Aniruddhan Vasudevan

In such a context, how do we constantly reaffirm our own primary identity as human beings and also affirm our equality with everyone else around us? What follows are my observations from the five-day Global Learning Festival 2012 at Mahabalipuram in November 2012. I met and interacted with people from around the world who share this approach to their work. In that process, they are guided by principles that make up the acronym SALT:

S – Stimulate, Support

A – Appreciate Actions

L – Listen, Learn, Link

T – Transfer, Team

The principle of SALT is the DNA of the CLCP work. The principles represented by each letter of the acronym appear self-evident, but they call for a constant self-reflexivity in us to make sure we are, indeed, practicing these principles:

When we work with communities, do we patronize, impose and intimidate or just stimulate and allow them to work on their own? Do we trample their self-esteem by taking over their work, or do we support them consistently with our presence? While most of our work focuses on problems and needs and gaps/deficiencies, do we remember to acknowledge and appreciate that which is there? Do we recognize and appreciate the strengths of the people we work with? Do we listen and learn rather than talk and teach? Isn't it true that we listen and learn only when we respect and appreciate? Are we humble enough to work in teams and not always want to fly solo? Do we have the skills to transfer our learnings from one experience to other?

As I read through the material about constellation’s work, and as I listened to Phillip when he explained constellation’s approach to me, the first thought that came to my mind was: “Haven’t I been practicing most of these for some time now in my own work with communities? Haven’t I also heard these principles emphasized in different contexts? So what’s new here?”

What I figured out during the Global Learning Festival was that these approaches, which appear to be obvious to some of us who are a younger generation of community workers, have not always been as self-evident as they seem to be now. Community work has not always come from a place of equality and respect. The binaries of ‘civilized/ barbaric,’ ‘helper/ helped,’ ‘researcher/ researched’ have also had a long history in human relations, underscoring inequality and lack of respect. Moreover, even in many modern articulations of the need for recognizing and respecting communities’ agency and autonomy, the practice of it stops short of being mere political correctness.

In such a broad context of approaches to community work, I found it of great importance that there is such an entity as the Constellation which has channeled the different affirmative approaches into a larger process called Community Life Competence along with principles enshrined in S.A.L.T. Thanks to this, there are now people from across the world sharing an approach and methodology to their work with different communities.

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