Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building

Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building

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“The parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building have helped me reflect on how to centre capacity-building processes around the strengths, knowledge, and experience possessed by people creating change in their communities” – Maria Rodrigues

Our colleague and Lead Researcher of Community Works, Maria Rodrigues has recently published a peer-reviewed article in the Community Development Journal, in which she discusses a parallel between capacity building in the context of community development and counselling in the context of psychotherapy. Based on this parallel Maria approaches the question: “can capacity building be conceptualized as community therapy?”

In a creative and rigorous way, Maria shares some of her experiences as a facilitator and reflects upon them by recalling elements from her psychology background. This brings to the table a different way of thinking about facilitation by comparing it to the way in which a counsellor might work with her or his clients. Using this analogy, Maria draws a parallel between a therapist, who helps individuals to cope with challenges and function better, and a facilitator, who helps groups to do the same in their communities.

A story… Maria introduces the parallel by describing the first time she facilitated a capacity-building workshop with a group of Indian Government Officials. Knowing little of the challenges and struggles they faced, she was plagued by self-doubt. What could she bring to the table? It turned out that it was her skills as a counsellor that were valued most by the group. This facilitating experience was not about her but it was about them. This gives rise to her reflection on how this analogy can be a useful way of thinking about facilitation and community capacity-building. We highlight the key points of this argument here.

Therapy and ‘Community Therapy’ as a healthy practice

Maria recalls her learning from psychology and how therapy “is not just for the sick” but also for “healthy, well-functioning individuals”. This implies an understanding of therapy as a process of reflection that helps us understand assumptions, identify barriers as well as find new and better ways of moving forward. From this perspective, therapy is beneficial for everyone at certain points of life. It is not about ‘fixing’ someone who is ‘broken’, and many times it is not even about healing the sick. Sometimes therapy is about helping healthy individuals meet extraordinary challenges or life transitions, just like development.

To explain this, Maria refers to the work of Sherry Arnstein (1968) and how this author says therapy and participatory planning might be ‘dishonest and arrogant’ when thinking these processes as ‘the cure’ for powerless and sick groups of individuals. Thus, a possible risk of thinking development processes as ‘therapy’ is to address groups or communities as ‘patients’ to be treated, ignoring the broader and structural development challenges that should be tackled as well. To avoid this pitfall, Maria argues community therapy should be addressed as a reflective process through which groups identify possible causes of their barriers to community development such as racism or discrimination. This allows groups to understand themselves as part of a system, acknowledging how barriers or difficulties might be part of a larger context and not necessarily something that should be fixed within them.

Accordingly, thinking about community therapy as part of development practice presents therapy as a platform for individuals and groups to prepare themselves, build the necessary capacities or practice possible tools to face and negotiate their situations or barriers as a group. Moreover, Maria argues how therapy should be a two-way process in which both counsellor and counselled or facilitator and facilitated are involved as equals- and not about an ‘expert’ imparting a process.

Contientization

Maria deepens her analysis by referring to the work of Paolo Freire and the concept of contientization, or ‘change of consciousness’. This idea suggests how citizens reflect on their realities as the first step towards making ‘their lives better’. Rather than a top-down approach proposed by an expert, these reflections should come from the communities, proposing an understanding of community development as a ‘transformation of mindset’.

Following this idea as well as the Liberation psychology framework influenced by Freire, this transformation implies a process of ‘unpacking’ or deconstructing live experiences as a ‘therapeutic process’. It is through this process of unpacking that a community might begin to liberate itself from oppression and injustice, as well as identify how to avoid further oppression.

Facilitators as community therapists

Maria recalls some of her personal experiences as a facilitator to show the parallel with her role as a counsellor and shares some of the counselling skills that have enriched her facilitation practice:

  • Identifying as an ‘outsider’ – The client, community or group are the experts about their lives and circumstances.
  • Active listening – As therapists do, facilitators are actively engaged and asking the necessary questions.
  • Awareness of multi-directional learning processes – It is not about a therapist healing clients but rather a two-way process of transformation.

Maria mentions how these parallels and distinctions have helped her to reflect on how to address capacity-building processes. Her paper invites our team to continually reflect about our practice as facilitators and ask further questions. How can we both facilitate and experience this process of transformation? How to do this when different cultural logics and mindsets come into play? We hope you enjoy Maria’s paper as we did and we extend this invitation to constantly reflect about how to practice and approach community development.

Reference: Rodrigues, M. (2017) Community therapy? Parallels and distinctions between counselling and capacity building. Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal Vol 52 No 2. pp. 372-377.

The problem of changing theories of change

The problem of changing theories of change

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The theory of change method of planning has rapidly grown in significance for organisations working in social and economic development.

Wherever I work these days, someone is developing a theory of change and I often get involved in the process.

It’s good because the whole approach helps us all to think about the cause-effect relationships that underlie the design of a project. For example, if an investment if to be made in local decision-making processes for using infrastructure budgets, the underlying theory is that local people will make more effective decisions on the use of funds than outsiders, leading to better results for the community.

Simply stating this theory and discussing it enables us to work out where the weakness in the logic might be found. In this case, can we be sure that local people have the technical knowledge to make infrastructure investment decisions? If not, then the project design needs to be changed to make sure that expertise is available to them in a timely and appropriate way.

I used ‘logic’ above, which is not a word associated with theories of change because they tend to be seen as an alternative to logic models. And logic models continue to be criticised as being linear engineering approaches to tackling messy, complex social problems. But a peculiarity of some theories of change is that they often look like logic models.

We have a problem, which is that the pure form of theory of change is being messed with. As a result, multiple methods are emerging and which have the same name but which are quite different in character. Here are three different types of theory of change I have seen recently:

  • Flow diagrams that show how one activity links to another over time, with boxes joined by arrows and not much in terms of testable theories shown.
  • Vertical logical frameworks turned on their side, complete with the usual input-activity-output connections in the middle.
  • A list of statements on how an action will lead to a result.

All the above were called theories of change.

Here’s a suggestion. Let’s use both logic models and theories of change for project design and planning processes. A theory of change is a way of testing the key cause and effect relationships that underpin the project. We ought to identify those relationships and work out whether there is evidence to support them. This is a good starting point for a conversation with a project team or a community group. For example, I was in a planning workshop and someone said ‘we need to get the elders to talk to young people about their anti-social behaviour’. The theory of change was that senior people talking to young people would lead to less anti-social behaviour.

It only took for this statement to be written on the board for people to start raising questions like ‘How do we know that young people listen to elders?’ or ‘Do the elders even want to do this?’. Once the testing of basic ideas had progressed for a while, we were ready to write a logic model. In this case, one of the activities prior to writing the logic model was to talk to a group of elders to find out whether and how they might be involved.

So, once all the theories of change are worked through, we ought to have a basis for preparing a much better design for a project than would have been the case. After that, using a logic model will be more effective as it should avoid us jumping to simple linear ‘solutions’ for social problems that simply may not respond that way.

The forest and the trees in facilitation

The forest and the trees in facilitation

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The term facilitation refers to methods and processes that enable people to collaborate on a given subject, especially where there might be complexity, different perspectives on a topic or even disputes and conflict.

I was recently invited to prepare a detailed tender submission for a role leading a facilitation team for a large and complex workshop. The client asked for responses to different scenarios and descriptions of how particular goals would be achieved through the facilitation. An occasional problem in facilitation is that the individual facilitator is given too much prominence in the process, as if they are some kind of motivational speaker. So I liked the way the tender concentrated on the proposed methods and the effectiveness of the process, a point that led me to write this article.

The work of convincing a client of the value of the particular approaches is a valuable exercise. It made me think in greater depth than usual about some challenges in facilitation, especially what works and why. I think of this as seeing both the forest and the trees. While an idea for facilitating a session might be sensible and proven, we need to have a clear sense of why we are choosing it. Some facilitators talk about ‘micro skills’, meaning the things you do to help a process along, such as the way the facilitator starts a session, how active listening is encouraged and ways to manage unevenness in participation. These are skills used to respond to what is actually happening at a particular moment in the process.

We need to combine these micro skills with a broader set of fundamentals for making the process effective. Here are some examples:

Getting the mood right

Groups participating in a process are often diverse and people may be in a setting to which they are unaccustomed. So they need to feel welcome and comfortable rather than sensing that they are being pushed through a program. The importance of setting the right mood and tone for the process, from the beginning, is often undervalued. The first session in each day, especially on the first day, should be lively and warm so people feel engaged at the start. Importantly, it should explain the purpose of the sessions that day and how the results are planned to be achieved. The tone should be one of relaxed productivity.

Straightforward language

A common mistake in facilitation is that the facilitator feels he or she has to ‘perform’, meaning that they interject too much, dominate proceedings or over-elaborate what they say. It is much better for a facilitator to be economical in their contributions, providing information using plan language. Explaining exercises visually and writing key words and phrases on a whiteboard is always a useful approach.

Inclusivity

Participants are different in their expectations of a workshop. Some will want to ask questions and make comments more than others. A key principle is to find a way for everyone to contribute in a way that suits them. So if people are nervous about speaking up in English, then some sessions will be more effective if they invite contributions on cards or visually on flipchart paper. Sometimes participants can feel like passive recipients of a plan developed in private by someone else. Instead, the thinking that underlies each day and its proposed methods should be explained by the facilitator. Bringing people along, and inviting their feedback, makes for a more open, inclusive and shared endeavour.

Judging the right level of active time

I have heard the complaint ‘I was just settling into thinking about the subject and then the facilitator had us running around like chooks’. This is fair comment and points to the need for careful judgement of the balance within a process between practical activities and listening time. People often want to be active, for the program to keep them moving around and doing group exercises. Most participants only want to listen to the same voice speaking to them for short periods before the next program component commences. But there still needs to be time for reflection. Getting the balance right is critical to ensuring participants are full engaged, encouraged and challenged.

In Community Works, we have recently developed some new methods and techniques for use in intensive workshops for Aboriginal health promotion workers and through teaching we have been doing on conflict resolution at James Cook University. I will share those methods and the learning that has come from them, in a future article.

Straightforward language

A common mistake in facilitation is that the facilitator feels he or she has to ‘perform’, meaning that they interject too much, dominate proceedings or over-elaborate what they say. It is much better for a facilitator to be economical in their contributions, providing information using plan language. Explaining exercises visually and writing key words and phrases on a whiteboard is always a useful approach.

Inclusivity

Participants are different in their expectations of a workshop. Some will want to ask questions and make comments more than others. A key principle is to find a way for everyone to contribute in a way that suits them. So if people are nervous about speaking up in English, then some sessions will be more effective if they invite contributions on cards or visually on flipchart paper. Sometimes participants can feel like passive recipients of a plan developed in private by someone else. Instead, the thinking that underlies each day and its proposed methods should be explained by the facilitator. Bringing people along, and inviting their feedback, makes for a more open, inclusive and shared endeavour.

Judging the right level of active time

I have heard the complaint ‘I was just settling into thinking about the subject and then the facilitator had us running around like chooks’. This is fair comment and points to the need for careful judgement of the balance within a process between practical activities and listening time. People often want to be active, for the program to keep them moving around and doing group exercises. Most participants only want to listen to the same voice speaking to them for short periods before the next program component commences. But there still needs to be time for reflection. Getting the balance right is critical to ensuring participants are full engaged, encouraged and challenged.

In Community Works, we have recently developed some new methods and techniques for use in intensive workshops for Aboriginal health promotion workers and through teaching we have been doing on conflict resolution at James Cook University. I will share those methods and the learning that has come from them, in a future article.

Key strategic choices in scaling successful projects and programs

Key strategic choices in scaling successful projects and programs

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DRUMBEAT is the world’s first structured learning program using music, psychology and neurobiology.

Through our relationship with the International Centre for Social Franchising, we have been helping organisations wishing to scale-up their work. One such example is a project with Holyoake, the Australian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Addiction Resolutions. Without going into matters that are the business of Holyoake alone, this article presents some of the insights we have gained through this and other project work and which have relevance to scaling and replication work more broadly.

Holyoake asked us to help their team explore options for developing a model for replicating DRUMBEAT in other countries through a franchise system. DRUMBEAT is the world’s first structured learning program using music, psychology and neurobiology. The acronym stands for Discovering Relationships Using Music, Beliefs, Emotions, Attitudes, and Thoughts. Beneficiaries of the program tend to be people seeking to improve their relationships and it has wide application in schools, mental health services, aged care and prisons.

First of all, some definitions. Social replication refers to the process of establishing a successful social-purpose project in a new location. Scaling-up is a program of work that enables social-purpose projects to be adapted to multiple locations. ICSF uses a replication scale to help organisations think through the best scaling strategy for them.

A discussion that often takes place is around the pros and cons of franchising and licensing as competing strategies. In deciding on which of these options to prioritise, there are commonly four factors to consider:

  • Desired degree of control; if an organisation desires close management of the work of implementers of its projects or services, then a franchise agreement is likely to be more suitable than a licence agreement.
  • Level of ambition; although licence agreements allow for targets to be set, the relationship provided by a franchise agreement is more conducive to striving for financial and especially impact targets.
  • Quality assurance; generally a closer and more hands-on approach to quality assurance is expected within a franchise framework than the focus on distance management that tends to come with licensing.
  • Relationship development; as implied in the previous above, a licensing arrangement places less emphasis on regular interaction between originator and implementer than social franchising does.

If social franchising and licensing emerge as two leading options, these four topics provide a starting point for a discussion on the most suitable option for an organisation to use.

Once a particular option for scaling has been chosen, attention usually turns to the design of a system for scaling. Again, a common area of discussion and debate is around the kinds of individuals, enterprises or organisations that might be recruited to become implementers in their locations. It can be useful to think in term of categories or profiles of implementers that represent different characteristics.

For example, a Category 1 Implementer might be a medium to large organisation based in an urban area with access to good infrastructure and specialised staff. It could be private sector or non-profit, such as a major health provider, with a large number of clients using services on a regular basis and a high enough financial turnover to enable investment in new initiatives.

A Category 2 Implementer could be a small- to medium-sized organisation, well-established as a social enterprise serving clients within a well-defined area. It operates a small number of services in high-demand locally and is seeking to innovate through new ideas, for which a reasonable demand has been identified. Needs to attract funding for new work, but has a reputation for quality and results meaning that existing funders might be open to supporting a scaling strategy.

A Category 3 Implementer could be a small community-based or grassroots organisation, possibly located in a rural or remote area with a lower population density than urban settings. It might have strong community networks and support and be working with vulnerable or marginalised groups such as disengaged youth or lone parents. It could have limited organisational resources and infrastructure, few specialised professionals and individual staff often covering more than one organisational function eg management and training.
The value of this approach to designing a network of implementers is that it brings a practical focus to the subject. The purpose of recruiting different categories of franchisee is to achieve the right balance of financial sustainability and impact that is fundamental to a successful process of scaling up.
Strategies for scaling is a fascinating topic as it goes to the heart of how the social and community sector can best maximise its impact for the people it serves. DRUMBEAT is an excellent example of a proven program with great potential.

Transaction and transformation in the work of civil society organisations

Transaction and transformation in the work of civil society organisations

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Thinking about the services that organisations in the social sector provide to their clients and the difference it makes for them in the long term.

Recent project work has led me to think about the services that organisations in the social sector provide to their clients and the difference it makes for them in the long term. In our sector, we spend a lot of effort making sure services are maintained on a day-to-day basis and that they comply with certain standards. While this is essential, of course, it is important to keep sight of the long-term objectives of a service or program.

Here is an example. I recently helped run some interviews and focus groups for people with disabilities living in isolated settlements in the north of Australia. The aim was to inform the design of services for this group of people and their carers. One insight that emerged was around the balance between their everyday needs being met and changes to their overall quality of life being achieved. On the one hand, individuals worry a lot about being able to move around in their homes as safely and efficiently as possible. Ramps in key locations, for example, are a part of achieving that. On the other hand, people are also trying to tackle the ongoing problems of, for example, isolation or not being able to spend time with family members or visit places special to them.

Another example comes from support for individuals and groups to start small enterprises. The work we have done with Enterprise Learning Projects and with BeadforLife comes to mind. Both organisations help people in situations of disadvantage build their confidence and skills in business. Again, there are tangible benefits to be achieved from income and skill development. And there are longer-term and more esoteric changes that come from growth in people’s confidence, self-reliance, connectedness and a stronger place in the wider economy.

In these examples, there is a dynamic between transactional work and transformational work. The transactional component is often day-to-day, regular service of some kind. It might be a home visit for a person with a disability or refresher training for small-scale entrepreneurs. The transformational part is what happens in the longer term, especially the difference to people’s quality of life that comes from reduced isolation, for example, or greater confidence and self-esteem. The key is for everyone involved to keep both the transactional and transformational aspects of the work front and centre of their thinking. While we might spend a lot of time working on the everyday, it is critical to never lose sight of the overall ambition of the work.

Overcoming isolation; why support groups are crucial for managing mental illness

Overcoming isolation; why support groups are crucial for managing mental illness

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I used to volunteer with a group for men recovering from mental illness, which was organised by a local mental health care organisation.

I used to volunteer with a group for men recovering from mental illness, which was organised by a local mental health care organisation. We would meet every Wednesday at lunchtime and usually around six or seven men participated along with a facilitator. The facilitator would suggest some ways to make best use of the time, including games to help with building memory, topics for discussion and ways in which people could interact with each other in a positive way. The group was designed to be a safe and confidential place in which members could feel free to speak their minds and share personal information and experiences.

I noticed a couple of aspects of the group that taught me a lot about mental health and made me want to do more work in this field. The first was that all conversations tended to lead to one subject; work. We all defined ourselves through our occupations and felt pride in the kinds of work we were able to do and how many hours a week we were working. Progress was celebrated in a quiet way: for one man to express happiness that he was now doing three four-hour shifts a week inevitably left others feeling unhappy that they could not yet return to work. I quickly became used to the subject of work coming up during the first few exchanges and remaining a key topic throughout the meeting.

The second aspect of the group that woke me up to the realities of mental illness was the obvious isolation that everyone was experiencing. It wasn’t that they were without friends because most people associated with the organisation were visiting the drop-in centre most days and meeting others in a similar situation. What I noticed was a more deep-seated separation from the world outside mental health care, as if somehow the men in the group were cast adrift from the rest of the community because people didn’t really know how to talk to them anymore.

The value of the weekly conversations was undoubtable. They enabled the men to talk about issues they faced and helped recover skills and abilities they had lost or which were dormant, including having a sociable conversation with a group of other people. One man talked about improving his arithmetic skills and getting back to playing cricket again.

At the same time, I wondered what the rest of the week was like for participants. I went back to my office and a busy work environment, while they carried on with the process of recovery, often a solitary journey.

The group taught me about important factors that aid recovery and management of mental health issues. A greater number of self-help groups with experienced facilitators are a way of the mental health system embracing people recovering from illness and keeping in touch with them. We also need people in the wider community to be much more aware of mental health and to be willing to help those affected to overcome their isolation. Understanding the central role work has in our lives, and helping those who want to work, helps them regain a sense of self-worth.

The weekly sessions in which I participated were similar to the groups that BasicNeeds offer as part of its global model for recovery. BasicNeeds’ work in low and middle income countries involves encouraging participants to be a part of a self-help group, as it is through these groups that members get social and economic support.

I decided to join the self-help group in my area so as to join forces with people, lend a hand in farm production and raise awareness about mental health in my community. The group has changed the perception of people in the community regarding mental disorders and have shown the community that they are capable of improving lives…

– BasicNeeds self-help group participant.

The groups offer ongoing understanding and support for the conditions participants are living with, they build confidence to help them advocate for a better understanding of mental illness with their community and they help them to prepare for employment. Within these groups, people are listened to and are able to express themselves. It is a step towards individuals developing ways and means to manage their mental health as well as to advocate for their needs.

Effective governance; insights from recent training courses

Effective governance; insights from recent training courses

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Starting meetings in the right way.

Ninti One has been conducting training in governance for voluntary committees in remote communities that are participating in the Stronger Communities for Children program, which is Australian Government supported. Working with colleagues at Ninti One, I have developed the materials and delivered the first few sessions in locations in the Northern Territory.
All along, we have wanted the training to be interactive, meaning that people get the chance to practice governance skills rather than just watching a presentation. Thanks to the willingness of committee members to have a go at the various exercises we have developed, some interesting insights and lessons on governance training have come out of the work. I share a few of them here.

Starting meetings in the right way.

It can be easy to think that board or committee meetings simply happen once everyone has shown up. The reality is that the start of meetings can be a messy and confusing business. Through the training, we noticed that an effective chairperson makes people welcome, sets the right tone for the meeting and gets the work started. Practising how best to start meeting makes all the difference.

Visuals replacing words.

Too much paper and too many words can sometimes get in the way of good decision-making. We found that summarising the main subjects for discussion in 1-5 words in a series of circles on the white board, with space for other people to draw arrows or make notes, provides a simple focus. In one case, the discussion really kicked off, with members of the group coming to the front of the room to explain their views on each subject.

Getting everyone involved.

Not everyone wants to speak in front of a group, which is fine as no committee needs to be full of public speakers. But still their views should be taken into account because everyone at the meeting is there as a decision-maker. We found that breaking up into small groups of 2-3 people to discuss particular topics really worked well. Here the chairperson has an important job in suggesting the right mix of people in the groups and making sure the report back from each one is clear and understood by everyone else.

Handling conflicts of interest.

A conflict of interest is not easy for anyone to define clearly, but most people know one when they see it. I describe it as a situation when a person’s role as a committee member is hampered by personal or family interests in a subject the committee is discussing. In small communities, conflicts of interest are inevitable. Through the training, we found that defining what it means, using examples and then agreeing a clear procedure where members declare their conflict of interest seem like a big step forward. Along with nepotism and confidentiality, the subject benefits from open discussion.

Improved and more effective governance is critical to remote communities. It has been a subject of much work by government, NGOs, researchers and communities themselves over many years. Ninti One is developing a sound approach to governance training that I hope will become more widely available in time.

Minyerri; what a community arts centre is for

Minyerri; what a community arts centre is for

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We have been working with the community of Minyerri recently through a project managed by Enterprise Learning Projects (ELP) through The Smith Family. The work is part of the Australian Government-funded Communities for Children program.

I visited the community in August during a period when the Arts Centre was being revitalised and relaunched, so it was an exciting time as the building was repaired and improved. A beautiful sign was created by the women and children at the Centre (see the photo).

At this time, the activities of the centre were also being planned, which is why I was there. My job was to help the people running the Arts Centre and ELP work out a way of planning and measuring the results of the work they would be doing at the Centre into the future. We call this a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, which is a grand-sounding name for a table with three columns and which follows the logic below:

Discussing this framework with the women at the Arts Centre led to one important question; what is the Minyerri Arrts Centre for? There are many answers to this question. As we talked about it, the conversation produced a set of outcomes that define what they are trying to achieve. Outcomes include sharing of knowledge between older and younger generations in the community, developing new skills, building self-esteem of children and young people and strengthening connections that they have with their history and culture.

These are early days but the Arts Centre is becoming a place for many activities to take place. Drawing and painting are part of the plan, especially as after-school activities. One lady is making cushions there. Minyerri is also the home of Gulbarn Tea and so the collecting and packaging of tea also takes place there. More information on Gulbarn can be found here: https://gulbarn.com.au.

The official opening day was 1st October. The children formed their own mini catering and events organisation, doing all the promotional material and distribution around Minyerri. They prepared wraps and popcorn and sold food and art to the community. It fitted in with one of the outcomes in the framework: ‘The community, especially parents, will know about the good things that kids can do at the Art Centre, that will help them grow up well’.

I will be visiting Minyerri again in February, this time to help work out ways to collect information on the outcomes being achieved. No doubt we will review the framework in the light of experience so far at the Arts Centre. I am looking forward to being there again with Minyerri people and the ELP team.

Countering violent extremism through social resilience

Countering violent extremism through social resilience

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It is September 11th, and I am steeped in literature relating to counter-terrorism. Community Works has recently engaged in a new project examining ways of building social resilience to prevent violent extremism, and, importantly, how to approach evaluation and impact assessment in this rapidly emerging area.

War and Peace by Jason Edmiston

A shift to prevention

Governments around the world are struggling to figure out how to prevent the disillusionment of the post-911 landscape from breeding future terrorist activity. The importance of research into countering violent extremism (CVE) has gained traction in recent years as increasing evidence demonstrates that hardline approaches to counter-terrorism can actually exacerbate the threat. At the same time, there is a surge in recognition that preventing new recruits from resorting to violent extremism requires a drastically different skillset from conventional approaches to counter-terrorism that focus on detection and interception of attacks.

Early approaches to CVE focused on broad attempts to ‘counter the narrative’ of radical ideologies, but it is now understood that ideologies are only a small part of the problem. More and more, analysts and policy-makers are recognising the need for social approaches rooted in local contexts. Growing emphasis is being placed on finding ways to build social resilience among individuals and communities to resist the pull of violent extremism.

Context, contact, and complexity

It occurred to me today that, like the broader field itself, my own approach to studying CVE is rooted strongly in the history of what happened on this day fourteen years ago. At that time, I was living abroad in Denmark as a volunteer at a residential school for at-risk youth. One of our students, Habib, had recently arrived from Afghanistan. He was almost fifteen years old, spoke little Danish and even less English. His father had vehemently opposed the Taliban, and their attempts to punish his family had driven them to flee. Soon after I first saw those planes slam into the skyline of a city I love, in the country where I grew up, Habib came to me and apologised with great sincerity. My response was astonishment: ‘No Habib! What happened today has nothing to do with you!’

But of course it did, because my government’s response was to launch an attack on Habib’s country. When he heard the news, he collapsed in tears and repeated adamantly ‘If they stop the Taliban then it will be worth it.’ This was no light statement: aside from his parents and siblings, Habib’s whole family, his entire history was in Kandahar, one of the first cities to be bombed. Whereas I had been able to pick up the phone and hear almost immediately that all my loved ones were safe, it would be months before Habib would learn the fate of his family. Fourteen years later, there are far too many young people facing similar situations.

The nuances that unfolded in this exchange with Habib have made it impossible for me to think of the ongoing wars in the Middle East as a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Although our countries were at war, it was plainly clear that he and I were not enemies and no amount of propaganda could convince me otherwise. The psych-social processes at play here fascinated me, and my research in the years that followed explored how interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds relates to peacebuilding. The social psychology of peacebuilding now plays a central role in my investigation of innovative methods for countering violent extremism.

The demand for research on CVE

Community Works has recently conducted a review of the literature surrounding CVE. A strong theme to emerge from the review is the demand for more rigorous studies, especially to develop effective methodologies for social approaches to countering violent extremism at the local level. Specifically, the literature points to the need for:

  • Collaborative, transdisciplinary approaches – most studies of CVE have arisen from security-focused fields; there is a strong need for input from a range of perspectives including psychology, sociology, education and public health;
  • Focus on stakeholder ownership and empowerment – there is strong theoretical support for the importance of empowering communities through CVE initiatives, but very few programs employ participatory approaches;
  • Studies that focus on women and girls – the vast majority of research on CVE has focused on men and boys, with very little consideration of the strong potential role of women and girls
  • Innovative methods for impact assessment – although governments are increasingly investing in social approaches to CVE, there remains no clear idea of how to gauge which programs are achieving impact;

In partnership with LaTrobe University, Community Works is currently developing a longer-term research project with the intention of filling these crucial gaps. The project will draw heavily from key theoretical frameworks emerging from the social sciences, such as intergroup contact theory, moral inclusion, and social cohesion. The central aim of the project will be to assist a local CVE initiative in developing ethical and effective methods for measuring and leveraging their impact.

Source: Holmer, G (2013), ‘Countering Violent Extremism: A Peacebuilding Perspective’, United States Institute of Peace Special Report.