Enabling Environment
Self Reliant Communities Do Not Exist in a Vacuum
Making the Environment More Enabling
 by
Phil Bartle, PhD

Module Introduction.

Documents Included in this Enabling Environment Module
Enabling Community Empowerment, no community exists in a vacuum; 87k

 Preparing a Community Development Policy Paper. guidelines making
 policy. 39

 Political and administrative laws, regulations and practices affect
 the strength of communities

 We usually think of a community mobilizer as a person working
 directly in a community: informing, organizing, guiding, in order to
 stimulate community members to unite, make decisions, take action
 and become empowered. The work of mobilisers goes beyond the
 community, and includes all things that affect both the strength and
 the strengthening of communities.

 All the things around every community that affect the community,
 can be considered the environment. With today's environmental
 concerns, we usually think of the physical and biological conditions
 around every community, but here we look at the political, legal and
 administrative conditions within which every community must exist.

 These can and often do have profound effects on how strong a
 community may be, and on how effective a mobilizer can be in
 stimulating increases in strength. Even the methods and strategies of
 mobilizers must be adapted to the laws, regulations and practices
 that affect communities.

 There are several ways you can influence the modifications of that
 environment,
 and you should be thinking of them now.

 To advocate is to argue in favour of something. Doing it is called
 "advocacy."

 All your work in trying to modify any of those laws, regulations and
 practices can be considered advocacy of some type or another.

 The core document in this module, Enabling Community Empowerment,
 describes various ways to have some influence on the environment of
 communities, whether directly as a mobiliser working to raise public
 awareness, as a professional adviser providing advice to persons in
 positions of power, or when you leave the profession of mobilizer
 and work in some position of power and/or influence. The document,
 Preparing a Community Development Policy Paper, is aimed at members
 of parliament, or equivalent, but is one which you should read in
 order to give effective advice.

 Remember that if you are working to change that environment, it is
 to make it more enabling of community self reliance. It is not to
 help communities (encouraging dependency), but to help communities
 become more able to help themselves.

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Updated: 2003 April 23