The nuts and bolts of strengthening community organisations

The nuts and bolts

of strengthening community organisations

Steve Fisher

Many years ago I had the opportunity to work with communities of Quechua-speaking people in the high Andes of the north of Peru. In one instance I was part of a team conducting a needs assessment to work out what programs or services a local NGO might be able to offer.

In one of the first communities we visited, we stopped in the street to talk with one of the senior men. It was cold and misty. He was wearing a big hat and a thick poncho. He looked weathered by the climate. We asked him what programs already existed in the community, especially supported or managed by government agencies. His reply was ‘el estado no llega aquí or ‘the state doesn’t reach here’. He seemed surprised we didn’t know that.

This experience, and many others since, have often led me to think about ways in which social development needs are best met if the government doesn’t arrive, which is the situation for most needs in most communities in many countries. The other options are the private sector, non-government or civil society organisations or the community itself.

Of course, the state might not be the best option anyway. During a recent project, I learned that a single department of the Government of Victoria (a state in Australia) has contracts with over a thousand NGOs, funding them to provide access to social services. Of course, this arrangement depends on the government having the resources, the mandate and the responsibility to support services in this way. Without budgets, then NGOs are not in a position to sustain services. And if service users are not able to pay the full cost, then the private sector cannot sustain a viable service either.

And so we arrive at local or community-based organisations. There are many very effective examples which are unknown beyond their own location. Two years ago in rural Colombia, my colleague Carolina and I visited an organisation that provides education and support services for children with disabilities. Their work is largely sustained through volunteers and contributions from local people and businesses. While we were working there a store owner delivered a donation of food and our accommodation was provided free of charge by a nearby hotel.

The Community Works team often discusses with community organisations how they can strengthen their work. We have been volunteers ourselves and so we have insights too. Faced with the day-to-day challenges of supporting their participants, few organisations have the time to reflect. Sometimes they don’t know what they don’t know. But given space to think about ways to strengthen their work, we commonly hear the same questions, which I share below with comments on approaches that have previously been effective in my experience.

How can we build our technical capacity?

If we take the example of community mental health and its myriad sub-divisions like suicide prevention and support for people who are lonely and isolated, organisations can often feel lacking in clinical skills if there is no trained mental health specialist on the staff. The same applies to a number of fields that benefit from or require specialist technical knowledge, which in the social sector include aged care, disability services, early childhood development and many others.

Without suggesting there are easy answers to any of these challenges, in a situation where technical capacity is lacking a sector development strategy can be a worthwhile option. This means that organisations work together as a group and seek external advisors to support the sector as a whole. The economies of scale can make specialist technical support more affordable and the prospect is more attractive to specialists because they have the opportunity to support a wider range of situations. I have seen versions of this approach work well in India and Sri Lanka, for example.

How can we innovate?

Organisations often have many ideas but few tools to develop what has inspired them into a project with objectives, a plan, milestones, resources and a means to sustain itself. Introducing methods like a theory of change, logic models, conceptual frameworks and a structured way of preparing a design document can be an empowering, even liberating experience, because it helps organisations crystallise what they might have been talking about for a long time.

A facilitated workshop can be a very effective way of supporting the process of turning an idea into a project, as I have seen on multiple occasions. Our publication The Facilitation Mosaic, available on the Community Works website, provides guidance on making workshops work.

How can we strengthen our management and governance processes?

The ways in which decisions are made and leadership and management works are often greatly influenced by the skills of people with often diverse backgrounds. Many local people who volunteer for organisations or are members of their board often have strong skills and experience, but from sectors unrelated to that of the organisation that are supporting. A foster care organisation may have a local estate agent and a solicitor as board members, for example. This is helpful, but they may lack social or development sector knowledge and will not necessarily know what good practice is, outside the professional disciplines that they come from. For that reason, organisations sometimes worry about whether they are governing and managing in a way that follows what might be called good development or social sector practice.

Again, there are tools, methods and best practice principles that can help. For example, collecting data on participation and impact for the work of the organisation is essential in any effort to build support and funding. Ensuring that strategies exist for community engagement and protocols for cultural safety are other important steps. Grounding the work of the organisation in published research and knowledge of a field of work is essential. All these elements of strengthening management and governance can be achieved by seeking external support or networking with others working in the field. A good example in Australia is SNAICC, the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, and the National Rural Health Alliance, both of which hold national conferences that are milestone events for many organisations and their staff.

How can we attract funding?

Many community organisations are not compliant with conditions that apply to philanthropic funding. They might lack a board, a strategy, proper registration or a constitution. And even if they do comply, the skills to prepare a compelling application for funding might not be available to them. We have also seen situations in which organisations struggle to find time to reply to enquiries from interested funders, such are the constraints to their management capacity.

It is too easy to suggest here that training is the answer, but training plus a period of support and coaching for a few months or more can make a huge difference to the ability of an organisation to tell the story of its work in a way that is competitive when it comes to applying for funding. Again, we have seen it for ourselves.

To conclude, this article comes from a belief in the value and the positive impact of community-led initiatives in social development. While their achievements are immeasurable, there is no doubt that so much more can be done when organisations are able to grow and become stronger. How to develop better strategies to strengthen community organisations is a subject worthy of much more attention.

Key ingredients for effective community research

by Steve Fisher

Key ingredients for effective community research

Steve Fisher

We have had a positive experience recently in working with two community groups to design and conduct research on topics they consider important. Both research projects were managed by Ninti One and we contributed to the work as their partner. I came away from each project thinking that the reasons why the projects went well deserved to be thought through and written down, which is the purpose of this article.

By community-based research, I am referring to any process that works with local people to conduct research. There are examples featured on the projects and publications pages of this website. In one of the projects that inspired this article, the objective of the group was to learn what the rest of the community thought about a cultural education program their organisation had been running and also an initiative to improve local employment opportunities. The community is located in the Northern Territory. In a second project, we trained a group of young people to conduct research on priorities for youth in a town in Western Australia. The aim was for them to make the case through research for government investments in certain services and facilities to meet the needs of young people.

For both projects, we worked through a standard research process which had the following steps:

Objectives – Working out the purpose of the research and what it was intended to achieve
Design – Identifying the information we needed to collect, choosing the research method (such as surveys or focus groups) and working out the sample (who and how many people we will talk to)
Data collection – Usually through small research teams.
Data analysis – Working out what the information we have collected is telling us.
Presentation – Preparing diagrams and charts that interpret and present the findings of the research.

In both places, the results achieved and the feedback from the communities were very positive. So, what were the key ingredients that led to effective community research in these example? The illustration below is a summary.

I will explain these four points. Some people might work best as lone researchers, but community-based research really calls for a team approach. We have usually worked with a minimum of six local people and up to around twenty. People feel more confident when doing something new as part of a team. It can be fun, especially when people share their sense of humour.

When starting the work, we have noticed that allowing up to a day for sitting down with people in a comfortable place and doing some preparation works really well. Some slides may be useful to show, especially where examples of research from other communities can be show and explained. But flipchart paper, whiteboards and marker pens are equally important. Writing down the five steps above, explaining how they work and then asking people for their suggestions makes for a process of participatory preparation that often brings the best out of the team given that they know the community well. For example, it may be important to ask:

What exactly do we want to achieve from the research?
How can we explain what the research is about, to people who are willing to participate?
Who should we talk to?
What methods should we use?
What is the best way to ask questions? What words and phrases will people find easiest to understand?
How should we record the responses of people?

It might seem obvious to include this point, but so many people in communities are invited to meetings for which the purpose is not clear to them. We need to make sure this problem is avoided when planning community-based research. Otherwise, the level of energy and interest of the team might understandably decline. It is worth writing a clear purpose on paper to stick on the wall and then referring regularly to it as the one everyone agreed in the first bullet point above.

The final key ingredient in effective community-based research is the methods. We commonly use and recommend surveys as being the most manageable method for local people new to research. Surveys can be administered fairly quickly across a couple of days, especially if there are small teams made up of two or three people moving around the community to talk to people. The results build over time and people can start to analyse and interpret the data as more information is collected.

Other methods are valuable too, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups and case studies. These methods take more practice and skill to manage but are important to a mixed methods approach that brings together qualitative and quantitative data.

‘We are not researchers’ – Making M&E accessible

by Steve Fisher

‘We are not researchers’

Making M&E accessible

Steve Fisher

The increasing need for evidence of the impact of investments in social development, health and education programs places pressures on organisations and their staff. This is not unreasonable, but for many people, monitoring and evaluation remains an obscure subject, distant from the day-to-day activities of working with clients.

Community Works often runs introductory training workshops on monitoring and evaluation for health workers, NGO board members or groups of development professionals seeking to strengthen their work in this area. Sometimes participants make clear their difficulty with the subject. ‘We are not researchers’ they say. ‘Çollecting and analysing data is not something we have done before’. Or, they sometimes imply, is that the reason we became health or community workers in the first place.

We have learned from these experiences. As a result, we try to develop materials and deliver training sessions that follow four key principles:

Modify language

The phrase ‘impact assessment’ often throws people off course straight away. We have found that ‘measuring change’ is a good way to talk about monitoring and evaluation because it leads to a conversation about what are the specific changes a project or program intends to achieve and how can we best measure those changes. In social development, usually the answer is to ask people good questions. The same applies to other terms, such as data (equals information).

Desmystify the subject

Monitoring and evaluation is research. But that doesn’t mean the subject has to be clouded by research process jargon. For example, data analysis can be broken down into a process of grouping responses to interviews or surveys into key messages, trends and ideas. We often suggest that teams measuring change present all their data on the wall or on a big table, so everything can be seen together. That makes it easier to spot key insights and other information.

Focus on the process

When an electrician or a plumber comes to my house to repair or install something, the technical language they use is often a barrier to me understanding what they are going to do. We have addressed language above. But not knowing the process also leaves me clueless about their work. The same applies to monitoring and evaluation. In supporting better practice, one of the most useful ways we have found to support people is to set out the steps required. We sometimes present the process visually, as a flights of stairs for example. Once people can see the steps, the whole process seems more manageable.

Build on the strengths of participants

Often, qualitative information is best collected through, for example, interviews and focus groups. It sounds obvious, but the backgrounds of certain professional or community groups can be very good preparation for this kind of work. For example, health workers are often skilled in putting people at ease and asking questions in a supportive and encouraging way. This means they are often very effective, once given the chance to practice and guidance on the way to facilitate a focus group, for example.

In our training programs, we like to introduce practice early on. We find that participants who might have approached M&E with indifference or fear, become animated and interested when they see how effective they can be in collecting information through talking to people.

Visual methods for working with community groups

by Steve Fisher

Visual methods

for working with community groups

Steve Fisher

This article responds to requests we have received for more information on visual methods that enable productive conversations with community groups. These conversations may be around problems they are seeking to tackle, the planning of a project, the airing of views on a particular subject or other situations in which someone is facilitating a session with a group of local people.

Rather than provide a detailed description of each method, I will provide an overview and the key principles that underlie it. There are variations to each one and different ways they can be adapted to meet particular situations. I am not claiming that these methods have been developed by Community Works, although we have certainly come up with visual tools and adapted existing methods. But often good ideas have emerged from discussions and planning of workshops with our clients and partner organisations and tailored to the specific situation. This is especially the case over several years of working with Ninti One. Some of the methods described here have also been inspired by specialists in a particular subject. The best-known proponent of mind maps, for example, is Tony Buzan.

Timelines

We have written about the River of Time method in a separate article about working with Minyerri community with Enterprise Learning Projects. It involves a group of people drawing the key events relating to a project or a place in a river depicted by two parallel and winding lines on flipchart papers. The river then becomes the overall flow of the history of the project or place. During an evaluation for Amnesty International, we had a similar experience of inviting activists and staff in Latin America to draw their journey through the program we were evaluating. Some chose to draw a road, others a river and some presented a set of events linked together.

Another example of a timeline came from a training workshop we facilitated for Enterprise Learning Projects in which Aboriginal small enterprises participated. One of the most valuable parts was when we drew and discussed a visual timetable for setting up a new enterprise, from sitting under a tree to discuss the idea to opening to doors of a café or a used clothes shop, for example.

Whichever timeline method is used, the value lies in a group of people discussing what has happened over time as they draw it together and then, with the help of a facilitator, making overall sense of the story and learning from it.

stakeholder maps

This method is well-established in development practice. It is easily adaptable to different situations. The basic idea is to draw shapes that represent individuals, groups or organisations that have relationships with each other or to another organisation (such as your own). The lines and arrows that connect them, the colours used to draw them, the distance between each one, the size of each shape and their position within the scheme as a whole can be used to denote aspects of the current stakeholder landscape. For example, a government department might be a large shape while women’s groups in neighbouring communities might be depicted as small shapes with close and strong links to each other, if that represents reality.

We have used this method many times. Ninti One devised a sophisticated version shown in the photo below and which grouped service providers in a community according to the sector in which they worked (such as health or youth services). The groups in this workshop then moved individual stakeholders to show how they planned to manage relationships for the future benefit of the program.

Again, the value of the method is in the conversation that ensues. If people have a different view on how the pieces of a stakeholder map should be drawn, then we can all learn from those differences and why they have occurred. For example, a government department might communicate quite differently to the CEO of an organisation than the community-based workers.

Mind Maps

We have used mind maps to encourage and record discussions on specific subjects with groups of widely-varying numbers, from three people to eighty. They work well when the purpose is to encourage discussion on a single topic, like community attitudes on road safety or the quality of housing. In these situations, the topic is written in the middle of a large sheet of paper and the facilitator invites comments from the group. Everything spoken is recorded on the map and this encourages participants to become active in the conversation, because they can see their ideas being heard.

This kind of visual mapping is especially valuable for small group work in training workshops, for example, or with boards or committees. In focus groups, drawing the conversation on a whiteboard helps people who may be reticent to speak to people they may not know. Facing the whiteboard to do the exercise, rather than each other in a roundtable setting, can be easier for everyone at the outset, depending on local cultural considerations too. It can become a lively process as the group helps the facilitator draw the conversation and then develop and connect the branches of the map as it develops.

Mosaics

Using the principle that all these methods are simply ways to have a productive conversation that helps a community analyse, plan or better understand an issue, mosaics work well because everyone can easily get involved. The best recent example was the model of governance we worked on with participants at the recent Knowledge-Sharing Seminar for the Stronger Communities for Children program. As people suggested components or principles or good governance, we built up a mosaic on the floor that was then presented back to participants in a visual report produced afterwards.

Mosaics, tiles or jigsaw-based methods are very flexible too, as the pieces can be moved around and the words written on each piece can be changed as the conversation develops and new ideas emerge.

Trees

Given that most development work is about growing something (capacity, knowledge, products, confidence, etc.), a tree is a very effective visual method. We have found that they work well as a way for a group to become active early in a meeting, when we might all be a little shy and apprehensive. If there are many people in the room and likely to be others arriving late, drawing a tree shape on the wall and asking people to stick notes on the branches that represent achievements or results of a program is positive way to break the ice. People arriving after the session has started can easily pick up what is going on and join in.

Being clear about the purpose is important. For example, asking people to write the results of the project so far as leaves that are stuck on the tree is a good, strengths-based exercise. To be more analytical, fallen leaves could represent unfulfilled ideas and flowers or fruits could be skills, relationships or unexpected benefits that have been achieved. A watering can could be the ongoing work required to make the tree, and therefore the project, develop and grow. A lot can be done with the use of a simple tree device, so long as time is taken to properly read and share the contributions that everyone in the group has made and to reflect on what they mean for our understanding or the project as a whole.

All the methods above require one or more people to facilitate them. The role of the facilitator is to introduce the exercise, explain the purpose, encourage and support people to get involved, tackle any problems or doubts that arise along the way and then draw out the key insights.

Using visual methods without facilitating the process properly is risky. If participants lose confidence in the process, then it can be very difficult to maintain their commitment to further conversations and to achieve the purpose for which people have come together. The facilitator helps the group gain most from the methods by encouraging them to learn from the information produced by each visual method.

Review and reflection instead of evaluation

by Steve Fisher

All development projects and programs need and deserve to be evaluated. A good evaluation measures impact, generates new knowledge on program design and provides insights on how to improve the work. An even better one engages participants and beneficiaries in the research required to conduct the evaluation.

Sometimes an organisation will want to achieve some of these benefits but without a full evaluation. The reasons may be varied, including that their program is not fully implemented, they are trialling an idea with limited resources or they prefer an approach that is more exploratory than a typical robust third-party evaluation. In our experience, situations in which a more limited review or analysis of a project is being sought by an organisation are quite common. While a rigorous independent evaluation is valuable, there is also a role for more modest processes. The following examples come from our work:

Perspectives of users

The Eritrean Community in Australia asked Community Works to provide an overview of the views of the participants in their programs and the users of their services. We conducted surveys and interviews with a cross-section of people and provided the results in a summary report that enabled the organisation to gain insights they could not otherwise easily achieve.

Review of program strategy

Engaged by Prahran Mission, we undertook a short review of an existing program that was being replicated in a new location. The organisation wanted advice on what was working well and what could be improved. We reviewed program plans and reports, conducted interviews of key individuals and compared the strategies being used with good practice examples internationally.

Support to internal reviews

Organisations may consider they have the necessary skills to review a program, but require advice on the design and management of the process, the data to collect and how best to analyse it. We recently performed this kind of support role for an NGO that implements rural education programs, enabling them to research and review their programs using existing staff skills. The idea was not to replace an evaluation, but to reflect on the work to inform a new strategy being developed for the organisation.

Understanding a problem

Working for a client of Ninti One, we assisted the organisation to work out why a group of vulnerable people in remote Aboriginal communities were not making use of government services designed to assist them. By locating the individual residents and inviting them to talk to us about their lives, their needs and the suitability of the services on offer, we helped Ninti One produce the necessary analysis and recommendations that would enable improvements to the services to be made.

Case studies

It can be very useful for the story to be told of an individual or a family who has benefitted from a program. Working on a program review in Nepal, we went to visit former participants in a mental health initiative and asked if they could share their stories for the purposes of in the form of a case study. Achieving a story of this kind requires trust to be developed between the story-teller and the story-writer, which means that more than one visit is certainly necessary. The end result can shed light on ways in which an organisation can best anticipate future challenges faced by participants. In mental health, this may include overcoming discrimination from others that creates barriers to work.

In all these examples, and many others, a critical starting point is to define the question the organisation is seeking to answer. For the example above on understanding a problem, the question is obvious since the client needed to know why services were under-used. For others, bringing rigour to the process commences with identifying the right question. For example, a review might seek to know ‘how does our work compare with current leading practice elsewhere?’ or ‘how can we more closely meet the needs of the community?’.

As well as the methods described above, there can be a role for group work in mapping and analysing the work of an organisation. Please see our separate article on visual methods for working with community groups, which provides further examples.

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