Throughout the world, people want the same things: access to clean air and water; economic opportunities; a safe and healthy place to raise their kids; shelter; lifelong learning; a sense of community; and the ability to have a say in the decisions that affect their lives.
Learn how ISC is proving that sustainable communities are possible. Elements of a Sustainable Community. Adequate access to public information. A viable, nongovernmental sector. An atmosphere of respect and tolerance for diverse viewpoints, beliefs, and values. Encourages individuals of all ages, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religions, and physical ability to take responsibility based upon a shared vision. Political stability.
Does not compromise the sustainability of other communities. Protection and enhancement of local and regional ecosystems and biological diversity. You start looking for partners and allies who would potentially become your Core Team.
You start building these relationships. You start fleshing out the concept and the vision a little more. Together with these few partners and allies, you start being a community, albeit a small one.
Once you have an MVC, you have a prototype, you have something tangible you can experiment with by bringing more people and further defining the scope and nature of the community. When you are first getting started with your community, there will be a lot of unknowns.
While ultimately you will want to develop a fully-fledged Community Charter , in the beginning you can start with a condensed version of it: a mini Charter. Properly framing questions is important. Hold preliminary meetings with community leaders and enlist their support to mobilize community participation. Often vulnerable communities are skeptical of outsiders and have been on the receiving end of broken promises to improve community infrastructure or provide much needed basic services.
Trying to engage communities directly through public calls for meetings without establishing community channels and trusted intermediaries may limit or delay your success in mobilizing communities to participate early in the program.
Once Sowing Futures systematized the results of leaders identified by community members during the community assessment surveys, we convened leaders to introduce them to the program and request feedback and advice on how best to engage the broader community.
We asked leaders to help us reach out to the community and to help organize the first community assembly meetings. Leaders proved instrumental in identifying the most effective methods for reaching out to communities. For example in one area where community participation has been particularly difficult, community members suggested we engage the schools and get the schoolchildren involved. We handed out invitations at school and asked the schoolchildren to encourage their parents to participate.
Leaders also went door-to-door to hand out invitations and speak on behalf of the program and the importance of community participation at the assembly meetings. Sowing Futures staff and community leaders also spoke at neighborhood church services and community group events, such as senior citizen gatherings. In rural communities we used radio programs to talk about the program and mobile megaphone announcements to get the word out.
Hold community assembly meetings to elect local representation to coordinate program activities. Our programs provide much of the knowledge and skills training to CDC members. Community capacity building activities such as long-term community development planning and project formulation and execution are led through and carried out by the CDCs.
While CDCs are set up as a program coordination mechanism, past experience has shown that the most successful CDCs organically transform into formal community-based organizations with legal representation and ability to receive funding from outside sources.
CDCs derive their legitimacy through community assembly meetings where community members nominate candidates and votes are held out in the open.
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