Oh no! Development is being done to us. 

Oh no! Development is being done to us. 

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On no! Development is being done to us.

The more I work with communities and community organisations, the more I learn about the value of the interpersonal side of development work. To be effective, professionals from sectors that regularly interact with local communities need to listen better, empathise more and take the time to understand the complexities of community life. These skills and aptitudes are undervalued, but they make a huge difference to the quality of collaboration between communities and external professionals seeking to work with them.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when a project is first being discussed. A project could be an improvement to a service like child care or aged care, an initiative to tackle a social problem like youth disengagement, or research designed to shed light on a local issue. Either way, the manner in which the initial discussions take place provides an insight into the ways in which power plays out in the relationship between the community and visiting professionals.

The reality is that often professionals come to the community with a pre-conceived idea for a project. It might be one that arises through changes in government policy (like more money for support to parents) or something that is central to the objectives of an NGO, such as toy libraries or youth groups. Professionals are supposed to be creative. Coming up with ideas and suggestions is what we ought to do.

Having contacted the community and been invited to share our proposal, we might propose our idea to the community and in the same breath say that we want it to be community-led.  This is where it gets interesting, because the question is; who is doing the development? One of the most direct responses I heard was when a community member said:

No, it can’t be done that way. You can’t come to us with an idea and then talk to a bunch of people individually, expecting that to be enough. We need to tell you who to talk with and how we want to make decisions on this subject. The right people need to be involved and we need time to talk it through.

He may have been thinking, as I was, that development was about to be done to the community. But when local people are able to say what they want, the power shifts. And the results are usually better as a result. What is needed is for outsiders to ask these questions of ourselves and the community:

  • What is the best process for discussing our idea?
  • Who should be involved?
  • When is the right time to do this?

What we are seeking to find is a sweet spot in the conversation where the community are leading. This means they are the people actually holding the pens and writing on the whiteboard.  

The best ideas arise from people working together over a period of time. The problem is that too often there is no existing relationship between the community and the external professionals. There might be a history of work between their organisation and the community, but each time the community has to deal with a new member of staff. This means that each time the relationship starts from scratch. It is a common problem in organisations or sectors or locations where staff turnover is high. In the absence of a solid relationship of trust and rapport, then the very first conversation is the one that is critical.

Making MEL easier

Making MEL easier

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Monitoring Evaluation and Learning, often called MEL for short, is the practice of collecting and analysing data on a project or program. MEL enables project progress, impacts and performance to be measured and lessons to be generated for improvement of future work.

So many organisations with which we collaborate or provide support in Community Works struggle to achieve an effective approach to MEL. It is either something they feel ill-equipped to do, a reporting burden or a reluctant add-on to projects that are already underway. Many teams rarely appear that they are comfortably and competently managing MEL as a key part of their work.

For MEL to be truly integrated to project work, this situation needs to change. Part of the problem is that MEL is a professional discipline all of its own and one that is akin to research. But most program staff do not have a research background. When educators or health workers or community development practitioners take up a position with an organisation, they are often not acquainted with MEL because it has not been part of their formal training or even their previous experience. Faced with the complex task of defining indicators to measure, collecting data relevant to each and then analysing the data, it is not surprising that they appear overwhelmed. This is especially true where organisations do not already have their own data collection processes and systems.

So, what can be done? Here are suggestions that draw on our experience at Community Works:

Bring in community voices

Most staff working in community or non-government organisations, or for directly for government agencies, are accustomed to speaking regularly with the users of services or with participants in projects. Part of their job is to build trust and rapport with people in the community.

To make MEL easier, these strengths ought to be harnessed. In other words, some of the data collected should bring the perspectives of the community into the data by asking community members what their experiences have been since the project started. A small number of well-designed interviews and focus groups can provide high-quality data and rich insights into projects and programs.

 

Choose indicators with care

Some changes are complex to measure and may require extensive work to develop indicators and then work out how to collect meaningful data. Examples are community resilience or effective governance.

Rather than trying to design a framework for MEL that encompasses the full complexity of a subject, it may be valid to choose aspects that are more measureable and to focus on those. In the case of resilience, a measureable component is the level of confidence that people in the community feel about the steps they will take when a future emergency occurs. For governance, a key element could be the development of the skills of the chair and other members of a community board.

Use Theories of Change

A Theory of Change (or ToC) describes the key cause-effect relationships that underlie a development intervention. The discipline of focussing on the basic rationale for a project or program can help us decide with greater clarity exactly which data we need to collect.

Working with project teams, I have frequently concluded that more time devoted to discussing a ToC and less time spent on brainstorming indicators will lead to a better plan for MEL. Developing a ToC may be yet another discipline for an overstretched project worker to learn, but the benefits justify the effort. The discipline of developing a ToC can be valuable for anything from a single project activity, like a women’s  group or a learning activity at a drop-in centre, to a major program scheduled over several years.

Less can be more

A few times recently I have been asked to review logical frameworks that represent the designs of projects or programs. Sometimes the column that includes indicators is very long. In other words, there are too many indicators. The impression is that the project team has thought of every single measure that could be applied but nobody has then culled the list to one that is manageable. One to three indicators per activity is usually enough for a logical framework. For a project or program as a whole, then between four and eight indicators ought to suffice.

 We must always keep in mind that practising MEL costs time and money. Focussing on a smaller number of indicators is more efficient and less overwhelming for a team to manage than trying to apply a comprehensive set of measures that cover every aspect of the project. There is little to be gained from adding more indicators if the existing ones already enable effective MEL.

Direction of travel

For positive changes that can take years to realise, such as changes in attitudes and beliefs, it is unrealistic to expect a project of one, three or five years in duration to achieve those changes. In these situations, MEL should therefore concentrate on indicators that represent positive steps towards those longer-term goals. We call this the direction of travel. For example, for an individual or a group of people to show greater awareness of the health effects of smoking is an important step towards a change of attitude towards smoking.

Coupled with use of a Theory of Change, being clear about the direction of travel is valuable in reducing unrealistic ambitions of MEL, making it less daunting and more effective for even small organisations with limited resources to use effectively.

Rather than MEL being a burden for many teams and therefore done either poorly or not at all, it can be made easier. As a result, the value of doing it becomes apparent again. With data on the difference that projects and programs make, we are in a better position to know whether they are actually working. And we also learn why that might be the case and how to improve our work in the future.

Getting it right in the design of community processes

Getting it right in the design of community processes

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A regular part of our activities at Community Works is the design of processes that enable communities and organisations to achieve their aims around planning, training, exploring new directions or bringing different people together to discuss a complex issue. Recent examples include:

  • Short online sessions for NGOs in Chile and Ecuador to discuss organisational development and community engagement strategies
  • Developing theory of change statements with organisations in India and Australia
  • Planning for a training workshop on community development for a disability services provider in Sydney
  • >Forest management planning workshops in three rural communities in Australia
  • Designing capacity-building sessions on mental health for support workers in communities affected by floods in Pakistan.

In every case, there are judgements to be made at the outset and during the work itself about the way the process runs (its tone, pace and level of interaction) and the content to be included. The more we are involved in this work, the more I have understood that the value to the participants depends enormously on these judgement calls. This article offers reflections on the subject taken from our own practice.

The most important starting point for optimal decisions on the process is to appreciate and empathise with the participants who have been invited. The answers to simple questions have great value, such as who the participants are, what kind of work they do and what their expectations are likely to be? A level of accuracy around the replies to these questions is very helpful in designing the process, especially if there is no time to meet or to survey them in advance.

Let’s consider an example to illustrate the point. We are often asked to run short training workshops on, for example, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) or community engagement for teams delivering health-related services. The individuals have probably been recruited because of their skills and background in a specific health field, like working with people vulnerable to addiction or supporting young mothers. While the training might be critically important to them, the participants may not have had any exposure to the subject before. In fact, they could be anxious that the training will be very technical and not easy to understand.

In a situation like this, we spend a lot of time working out the best way to build people’s confidence around a subject. In the case of MEL, with its language of indicators, data collection and analysis, participants might feel that they are being asked to become researchers, but without any prior experience in that subject. The pace of the workshop and the choice of content is therefore vital if they are to feel they have achieved progress through a short training workshop.

Another situation common to our work is the design of community consultation processes. Let’s say a large organisation, such as a government department, is developing a plan for the management of natural resources in a region and they wish to consult with local people. For this to be a meaningful process, the key judgements to be made are around the level of openness and inclusivity that is desirable within the constraints of time and other resources. Who will be invited to participate? How much of the consultation will be conducted through surveys and how much will be in-person? How many locations will be the site of a consultation workshop, especially if travel distances are large?

In a recent example of this kind of process, the key judgement call was that work in small groups would be an effective way to make sure everyone had a chance to talk about the key issues. It also provided an opportunity for everyone present in the workshops could hear everything that had been said by everyone else. In other words, we prioritised openness as a principle instead of using the time available to analyse what the groups had discussed. Everyone’s voice was heard because their comments were written on cards and read out to the entire participant group. The analytical work was deferred to the next part of the process. The result was that the workshop generated content for later analysis and feedback was that this was most valuable to the participants because they felt that their work had been taken seriously.

Turning to another scenario that is common to Community Works, we are often asked at the outset of a process about the degree of interactivity that will be involved. By this, I mean how much of the process will be characterised by presentations followed by questions and answers as opposed to a more interactive approach using group and individual exercises that emphasise everyone being active in the process.

It might be the case that some staff of organisations actually resent being required to attend workshops and that some community members are tired of meetings. For that reason, it might be assumed that those people come along intending to sit back in their chairs and listen, but not necessarily to participate actively. Our experience is that we have never received feedback that there was too much interactivity in a workshop. My starting point in planning a process is therefore to aim to get people active and engaged from the start, but in a way that takes into account who the participants are, how reserved they might be, their comfort in the main language of the workshop and their physical ability to move around if we are proposing exercises that require people to be up on their feet. In other words, the judgement to be made on interactivity ought to be influenced by our empathy for the people who are going to be there.

The best recent example of a decision we made to be highly interactive was in a training workshop conducted by Javeriana University, Community Works and Kindred for a group of mental health professionals in Colombia. Participants ranged from senior academics and experienced physicians to early-career practitioners and students. They responded to the group and individual exercises put to them by energetically drawing visual models, responding to questions we posed and taking part in role-playing scenarios. This approach may not have been effective with a less open group of people, but here it maximised the value of the workshop for everyone.

These reflections point us in a similar direction. The design of professional and community workshops and related processes must start with an appreciation of the people who will be participating. Investing time in finding out who is coming, the relevant aspects of their backgrounds and their likely expectations is fundamental to achieving the best results for everyone. At the same time, the information needs to be used for careful judgments on the design of every aspect of the process.

Framing matters in community engagement

Framing matters in community engagement

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A common scenario in development work is that outsiders wish to talk with a community. The purpose could be to consult with them about a particular subject, gauge their interest in a new program or seek their views on how a problem might best be tackled. Commonly, the outsiders are from a government agency, an NGO or a consulting company. The community people could be staff of local organisations, members of the local council, selected population groups (such as parents of young children) or people invited at random to meet the visitors.

In recent months I have worked on several projects for different clients that have involved exactly these kinds of processes. Subjects of discussion have included eye health, new child care services, parenting skills, education initiatives, collective impact and mental health. In development practice, the over-arching term for this work is community engagement.

Community engagement refers to the process of building working relationships between external professionals and local people and groups. While good practice in community engagement can be achieved through applying certain principles and strategies, what has struck me about the work we have been doing recently is that the way the questions are framed has been critically important.

Let me explain.

When an outsider asks questions of somebody from a community, they are almost always being intrusive. This can happen even if the subject matter seems innocuous. For example, if I ask someone to tell me about the condition of housing in the community because the organisation I represent is interested in helping to improve it, this might appear to be a reasonable question about materials and maintenance. But it can mean more than that to the people being asked the question.

Years ago, I worked as a surveyor for the National Housing Survey in the United Kingdom and noticed how anxious people became when telling me their bathroom was mouldy or their roof leaked. Asking questions about these subjects invites the participant to point out where something has gone wrong in the design, construction or maintenance of the place where they live. Maybe they feel responsible or negligent. Perhaps they are nervous about pointing out shortcomings in the work of other people or organisations.

An important principle is to recognise that many subjects are sensitive and community consultation can be intrusive. If the condition of housing is a sensitive subject, so will be topics around education, health, water use, parenting, enterprise and almost any other subject. The way questions are framed is therefore important if outsiders are to encourage people to participate in the conversation in a way that suits them best. By framing I refer to the way we say something, how we say it, what we include or leave out and what we emphasise. There may be several ways of asking a question and each one can lead to a different level of comfort and engagement by the person to which it is asked.

Here are some insights on ways we have framed questions to encourage people to respond without feeling pressured, disempowered or even offended:

Questions should be asked in a respectful way, as part of a conversation. To achieve this aim, the outsider should use a set of topics for discussion instead of a list of rigid questions that they must complete. People should not feel that they are under pressure to respond.

Example:

Have you any thoughts about safety in the community? Is there anything you have seen or heard that might help improve safety?

At the same time, it is important to avoid words than may be common in a professional work setting but are rarely heard in the community, especially where people are using English as a second or third language. For example, if I ask someone ‘what aspects of the youth program did you like the best?’, the word aspects might be entirely new and not clear to them. A better way to ask the question could be ‘what did you like about the youth program?’.

Similarly, some words may be used differently in the community to the way they are used in a professional workplace. For example, if I ask ‘what conditions need to be in place for the program to be successful?’, people may interpret conditions as being about the state of something, like the condition of a car. Removing the word from the question makes it easier to understand, like this ‘what needs to be in place for the program to be successful?’.

Referring to one of the questions above, ‘Can you tell me how using the sports facilities has been for you?’, it would be easy to say ‘Can you tell me how the experience of using the sports facilities has been for you?’’ but the word experience might confuse people and so it is best left out. In trying to use plain English, I make mistakes all the time. Getting better is an ongoing challenge.

To conclude, the discipline required in thinking through the way in which questions are framed and the words that are used is a healthy one. There is an important ethical dimension to the subject due to the potential for causing harm to relationships in the community or intruding on delicate matters through insensitive questions.

Practising community-led development

Practising community-led development

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Practising community-led development

Steve Fisher

On the face of it, community-led development ought to be straight forward. A group of people with common interests decide on a goal they wish to achieve or a problem they want to tackle. They enlist external support, usually meaning technical knowledge, materials and funds. Then they develop a plan for something that is probably called a project. They go ahead and implement it.

In the process of developing a new course on practising community-led development, I have been thinking about what makes the subject more complicated in practice than it might seem from the outside. A starting point is to set out the parameters. Examples of community-led projects fall into four categories:

  1. Local infrastructure improvements, such as roads, water supplies or better housing
  2. New or improved enterprises or services to address gaps in, for example, childcare or education
  3. Initiatives designed to tackle problems that the community might be experiencing, such as conflict or homelessness
  4. Projects to build local skills and capacity for specific purposes, such as youth leadership or community governance.

The basis for successful projects are the methods and techniques, skills and aptitudes that define community-led development practice. Applied with skill and care, they enable the objectives of a project to be achieved. But communities are complex, so nothing is easy.

At the centre of most projects are a set of relationships between the community, an implementing organisation, some specialised contractors and a government agency or a private funder (or both). The decision-making processes, the power and the authority that are exercised through those relationships have a profound influence on the eventual outcomes. This means that the agreements between parties and the way they are applied are fundamental.

The question of which people from the community participate in the project and how they participate has long exercised anyone who has worked in this field. Strategies that consider the priorities of different population groups within the community, as well as those from outside the project who may be affected by it, are central to effective practice. The roles of women, men, young people, people with disabilities and minority groups within the community need to be defined, especially when key decisions are being made. 

All projects need to be designed. In other words, they require the parts to be brought together in a way that enables them to be implemented. These components include clear objectives, a team, resources and knowledge and a set of defined and scheduled activities (the actual work to be done).

Similarly, all projects must be managed in an accountable way to enable the design to be implemented. The role of data is central to effective project management, whether to gauge progress, to obtain the right measure of needs and priorities of the community or in the monitoring and evaluation of the work.  Processes for learning and improving through the data collected are also part of the overall picture.

Given that community-led projects are concerned with improving the health, welfare, safety, prosperity and happiness of people, then considerations of ethics and equity are central to practising community-led development.

As we develop the course, I will provide further updates through the Community Works blog.