Building Capacity
1. Create or recreate a coordinating committee and use it to mobilize the community and engage w/ outside agencies….A coordinating committee brings groups together and distributes responsibilities among those who will act.
2. Identify past successes. What a community has done successfully is the most likely base for future success. On its own a community may not see what really are its successes and strengths. Experts can help identify these and can help redirect action so as to build potential.
3. Study successes and visit other communities. Find options that have worked for other people and adapt these to each local situation. Send people for these visits who will actually do the work (not just the powerful) so that the backbone of the community gets practical training.
Choosing a Vision: SEED (Self-evaluation of Effective Decisionmaking)
4. Evaluate the situation objectively (self-evaluation). Create a community-specific database instead of working only from people’s opinions. Gather information on problems and resources, and identify those in the community with specific skills or potential and the ability to forge agreement.
5. Discuss sources of problems, explore possible solutions, and decide which problems are most urgent (effective decision-making). Once people in the community have agreed on the priorities, they can draw up a work plan that assigns jobs and functions to all.
Taking Action
6. Involve as many people in the community as possible. Start projects that will be popular because they respond to felt needs. Aggregate activities so that momentum converges and builds.
7. Monitor momentum and identify gaps in action to make midcourse corrections in how work is actually performed. Then reallocate functions. It is less important to get action right at the beginning than to try options, adapt them, and keep improving.
The Three Operative Principles:
1. Forming a Three-Way Partnership (Bottom-up – Communities; Top-down – Officials; Outside-in – Experts)
1. The Three Traps of Experts:
1. Professionalism
2. Distance
3. Power
2. Basing Action on Locally Specific Data
3. Using a Community Work Plan to Change Behavior
Six Criteria to Monitor Progress
1. Equity
2. Sustainability
3. Interdependence
4. Holism
5. Collaboration
6. Iteration
Sources:
1. Daniel C. Taylor-Ide and Carl E. Taylor, Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures. Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, 2002).
2. Daniel C. Taylor-Ide and Carl E. Taylor, Community Based Sustainable Development: A Proposal for Going to Scale with Self-Reliant Social Development, UNICEF Children, Environment, and Sustainable Development, no. 1 (New York, 1995).
