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KEY WORDS FOR THE "GETTING PREPARED" MODULE

by Phil Bartle, PhD

ANGER

Potentially, the most dangerous emotion in our work is anger ─ how we deal with it. As human beings, we have emotions, and anger is only one of the emotions. It is OK to be angry; that is part of being human. We should not feel guilty or become embarrassed when we feel the emotion of anger. Anger itself is a normal human emotion. We need to accept it when we become angry.

How we act when we are angry, however, can affect our work, whether we are mobilizing communities, co-ordinating volunteers or managing staff. When a client, volunteer, staff or community member makes a mistake, especially one that affects our objectives, for example, we are tempted to show our anger, when that is precisely the time we should be calm and cool.

When we see someone make a mistake that affects our desired output, we need to recognize that seeing it makes us angry and that it is our responsibility to deal with that anger. The best immediate action to take is to go for a walk. If there is not enough time, then we should at least go into another room without displaying our anger, and let it die down there, outside the view of those who angered us.

Then, when we have our anger under control, we can more effectively deal with the thing or event that sparked our anger. If it was a mistake by a client, volunteer, staff or community member, we can take action as described in the key word, Mistake. That action can only be effective if we undertake to do it while being cool, calm and collected.

ANIMATION

Sometimes called social animation, From the Greek word anima (life, soul, fire, auto-movement). To stimulate or mobilize a community so that it moves itself, so that it lives, so that it develops.

Sometimes used as a substitute for mobilization. Animation means uniting and mobilizing the community to do what it (as a unity) wants to do.

Community Empowerment Methodology takes social animation a step further, using management training methods to further increase the capacity of the community, or its community based organizations, to decide, plan and manage its own development. It trains community members and leaders in management techniques needed to ensure the community takes control of its own development.

It also encourages and trains government officials, local authorities and community leaders to abandon the patronistic role of providing facilities and services. They learn to facilitate communities to identify resources and undertake actions to provide and maintain human settlement facilities and services.

ANIMATOR

Mobiliser. See: animation.

APATHY

Apathy is one of the five main factors of poverty and dependency.

It is sometimes related to a fatalistic philosophy. Yet, "Pray to God, but also row to shore," a Russian proverb, demonstrates the view that we are in God's hands, but we also have a responsibility to help ourselves.

We were created with many abilities: to choose, to cooperate, to organize in improving the quality of our lives; we should not let our ideas of God or Allah be used as an excuse to do nothing.

CAPACITY

The ability, power or strength of a community or an organization. When it is empowered, it gets stronger.

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT

Increasing the "capacity"(ability) of a community or an organization. Empowerment. Strengthening.

See Elements of Strength for a list of sixteen elements of capacity building.

The difference between capacity development and capacity building lies with the conception of where the force of growth originates. The term "capacity building" implies that some agency outside the community or organisation supplies the energy to increase its capacity.

It is informed by the concept of "social engineering." The term "capacity development," in contrast, implies that the energy for growth is internal to the community or organisation.

See the slogan by Julius Nyerere; a community develops itself.

CELEBRATION

A celebration is a happy recognition of an event, usually one which changes the status of a person or thing. A celebration is a public party.

For a mobilizer, celebration of completion of a community project is an important element of community empowerment, where the community is publicly recognized for successfully engaging in self-help.

It is also an opportunity to start a new beginning, another mobilization cycle. See Mobilization Cycle. See Celebration.

CHARITY

The helping of poor or needy people is a universal value, and found in all the major world religions. But there is giving and giving.

If your gift makes the receiver dependent upon you, then you are not helping to strengthen the receiver, or helping him or her become more self reliant.

When you give some coins to a beggar on the street, then you are training that person to be more of a beggar.

If your assistance is well thought out, and helps to strengthen the receiver (see the story of Mohammed and the rope in Stories), then it is a much more useful gift.

COMMUNITY

The word "community" has been used in several different contexts. Biologists talk of community as meaning several individuals in a single species, or several different species, living, competing, co-operating, to make a larger whole.

Since the advent of the internet and information technology, various collections of persons, often those sharing a single interest, have grown up, without geographical boundaries, and who communicate electronically. The focus on this web site in this training series, is on a more orthodox meaning of community, a community of living human beings, one which usually has geographic boundaries (except those may be stretched, as in nomadic communities), associated, for example in communities that range from local neighbourhoods in large urban areas, to remote rural villages. See Habitat.

A community is not just a collection of individual human beings. It is a super organism that belongs to and is part of culture, composed of interactions between people, everything that is learned. Its six dimensions include: technology, economy, political power, social patterns, shared values, beliefs and ideas. It is not transmitted by biological means, but by learning.

Like a tree or other life form that transcends the very atoms which compose it, its human members can come of go, through death, birth or migration, and it still continues to live and grow. It is never homogeneous, having many factions, schisms, competition and conflicts within it. A community is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. See "What is Community."

See: Community Characteristics.

COMMUNITY BASED

For a project or organization to be community based, it must originate in a community, must have community members responsible, and have its decisions (policy and executive) made by community members.

An outside agency or project that is merely located in a community can not rightly claim to be community based. Also, consulting with community leaders does not make it community based.

There is a big difference between community-based and community-located If an agency sets up a service in a community (eg a clinic, an IG programme), then that is community-located.

To be called community-based correctly, an activity, construction, service, or organization, must be chosen, selected and controlled by the community as a whole (not just some factions). The important thing is for decision making to be community-based, the decisions must be made inside and by the community.

See Community Based Social Work in Refugee Camps.

COMMUNITY BASED ORGANIZATION

A CBO is an organization that has been formed and developed within a community, where the decision making (management and planning) is from the community as a whole.

An agency that is formed from outside, and has decisions made for it from outside, may be community located, but is not community based. See the Acronym, CBO.

COMMUNITY BASED REHABILITATION

Rehabilitation in this context means physical (biological), emotional or mental rehabilitation (or habilitation) of persons who are disabled by some physical, emotional or mental incapacity.

Where rehabilitation is community based, then the decision making and responsibility for the habilitation of those disabled individuals are in the community, and do not originate outside the community.

See the Acronym, CBR.

COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTION

When we point out that community participation is not the same thing as community contribution (though many mistakenly assume it is), we also note that both are necessary.

While community participation means the decision making that makes any activity community based or community centred, community contribution is necessary to ensure that the community members feel that they own the project, ie that they have invested in it, not just received it.

We recommend that at least fifty percent of the inputs of any community project that we support must come from the community itself. At first this is often viewed with anxiety and despair from many community members. Then we point out that the donated communal labour alone has to be fairly calculated, and that if they did so, they would be pleasantly surprised at how much value that would add to the community input.

We point out that the time spent by community members, especially those that sit on the executive committee, deciding and planning the project, are donations of executive and management skills, time and labour. The donated labour should be fairly costed. Furthermore, we point out that the value of donations of sand and dirt, too, are often underestimated, and should be recognized, with fair cost estimates, as community inputs.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

When a community develops, it grows. See the word, Development. It does not necessarily mean getting bigger or getting richer. It means getting more complex and stronger.

A community does not get developed by a mobilizer any more than a flower grows taller by someone pulling it up. A community (as a social institution) develops itself. A mobilizer can only stimulate, encourage and guide members of the community.

Some people assume that community development simply means getting richer –– an increase in per capita wealth or income. It can be, but is more.

It is social change, where a community becomes more complex, adding institutions, increasing its collective power, changing qualitatively in its organization.

Development means growing in complexity in all six dimensions of culture. It differs from community empowerment which means growing stronger. Although the two are different by definition, they are intricately linked to each other.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

To increase capacity of a community is to increase its ability to do things for itself.

It is more than just adding some communal services or facilities like roads, sanitation, water, access to education and health care.

It means increased ability and strength. It means more skills, more confidence, and more effective organization. It can not come about by charity or donation of resources from outside. It can be facilitated through action such as community projects, but only when all community members become involved from the beginning, to decide upon a community action, to identify hidden resources from within the community, and by developing a sense of ownership and responsibility of communal facilities from the start to the finish.

While increased democratization may be helped by Government devolving some law making power to the community, its capacity to make use of its legal decision making depends upon it having practical capacity, ie the ability to make decisions about its own development, to determine its own future. Power, strength, capacity, ability, empowerment.

Community development means growing in complexity in all six dimensions of culture. It differs from community empowerment which means growing stronger. Although the two are different by definition, they are intricately linked to each other.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT TRAINING

Community management training is aimed at poverty reduction, the strengthening of low income communities in the planning and management of human settlements communal facilities and services, their construction, operation and maintenance. This is training for action, not just for skill transfer or for giving information to individuals.

Training, as a method for strengthening low income communities, for poverty reduction, for promoting community participation, for practical support to democratization and decentralization, is far from being only the transfer of information and skills to the trainees. It also includes mobilizing and organizing. This is non orthodox training.

Formalization and institutionalization of this kind of training brings with it the danger of emasculating the training, of emphasizing the skill transfer over the encouragement, mobilization and organizing aspects of the training>.

Management training in this sense was developed for strengthening the effectiveness of top and middle management in profit making corporations.

It has been modified here, and integrated with techniques of trade union organizing, for the purposes of mobilizing and strengthening the capacity of low income communities to come together, help themselves, for developmental social change.

COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Community participation is far more than the contribution of labour or supplies; it is participating in decision making, to chose a community project, plan it, implement it, manage it, monitor it, control it. It differs from community contribution.

Social Animation promotes the activities of a target community, with a view to the community taking more responsibility for its own development, starting with decisions about what projects to undertake, and stimulation to mobilize resources and organize activities.

Community participation promotion aims at ensuring that decisions affecting the community are taken by all (not only a few) community members (not by an outside agency).

In this methodology, community contribution is encouraged, for it helps the community to become more responsible for the activity if they invest their own resources in it. We also encourage Government, and outside donors to discuss their activities with the whole community; this is community consultation.

Community participation here should not be used as the equivalent of community contribution or community consultation (as is misleadingly done by many assistance agencies); participation here means participation in decision making, in control and in co-ordination.

CONSULT

When an aid agency or donor organization consults with community leaders or representatives, they often ask if the community wants a project. That answer is likely to be, "Yes." The agency may then report to its board or donors that there was community participation. That is incorrect.

What has taken place is a consultation, not genuine community participation in decision making, choosing and planning a project from among the community priorities (in contrast to the agency's priorities).

CONTRIBUTION

Some people will confuse participation with contribution. Many people, when they hear the phrase, community participation. assume it only means community contribution. They think only of the communal labour that members will put into the project.

Unfortunately, there have been many cases in the past where community members were treated as serfs or slaves and forced to contribute their labour (or other resources, eg land, food). The methodology promoted in this handbook is quite the opposite. Participation here means participation in decision making, not merely the contribution of resources. See community contribution.

CRITICISM

One of the most important bits of wisdom to learn is that when we see something wrong, to criticize it usually does not make it right, or correct the problem. Instead, it usually makes the problem worse.

Why? Because human beings feel threatened and under attack when someone is criticizing them. Criticism lowers our/their self confidence and self esteem. We become defensive when criticized, and instead of correcting the mistake, we tend to defend it.

When we are mobilizing communities, co-ordinating volunteers, or managing staff, we must learn to expect that they will make mistakes and be prepared to deal with those mistakes in ways that further our aims.

Showing our anger, criticizing the person who makes the mistake, may serve a purpose of "venting," but we pay a huge price for that personal relief. Refer to the key words: Mistakes, Anger, and Sandwich, and search for ways to correct the mistake without negative criticism.

See: Praise Often.

CULTURE

More than merely songs and dances, culture, in social science, means the overall social system, the total of all learned attitudes and behaviour, consisting of socio-cultural systems belonging to six dimensions: technological, economic, political, interactive, ideological and world view.

The basic unit of culture is the "symbol." Culture is not genetic; it is transmitted by communicating symbols. Sometimes called the "superorganic," because it is composed of systems that transcend the biological entities, humans, that compose and bear culture.

See "Culture." A community is cultural. See: Strange Fish. See Culture; Different Meanings.

DEPENDENCY (syndrome)

The dependency syndrome is an attitude and belief that a group can not solve its own problems without outside help.

It is a weakness that is made worse by charity. See: The Dependency Syndrome.

DEVELOPMENT

Many people assume that development means quantitative increase, whereas its main characteristic is qualitative change.

To develop is to grow, and to grow means more than to get bigger; it also means to become more complex and stronger.

When a community develops, it gets stronger and more complex. It undergoes social change.

See "Culture." An economist may see development as only an increase in wealth or income (absolute or per capita); and an engineer may see development as a greater control over energy, or more sophisticated and powerful tools.

To a mobilizer, however, those are only two of the six cultural dimensions of a community that change. Development means social change in all six cultural dimensions: technological, economic, political, interactive, ideological and world view.

See Community Development.

DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE

Each dimension is composed of socio-cultural systems (eg the economic system) which combine to make a super-organic system.

The six dimensions are: technological, economic, political, interactional, ideological and conceptual.

A community is a cultural or social entity, so the dimensions also apply to communities. See: Dimensions.

DISEASE

Illness is one of the five major factors of poverty.

It is cheaper, more humane, and more productive for a society or community to prevent than to cure disease and to direct limited resources towards the treatment of a few common diseases affecting the majority of the population, rather than towards sophisticated equipment and skills for the treatment of a few wealthy people (thus the reasons for WHO promoting and supporting the principles of primary health care).

Knowing this, you the mobilizer may challenge a community's first and lightly considered choice of a clinic, and perhaps let them see the logic and reasoning for first choosing effective water and sanitation systems to prevent water borne diseases.

DISHONESTY

Lack of integrity and lack of honesty. Dishonesty is one of the five major factors of poverty.

Comes with various labels, including corruption, embezzlement, extortion and theft. It happens when wealth intended for development of the whole society is illegally, and usually secretly, diverted to benefit individuals who betray their positions of trust as servants of society as a whole.

The resulting lack of trust contributes in turn to apathy and poverty. That is why you, as mobilizer and organizer of community organizations, promote transparency, integrity and honesty in the groups you organize.

DOING (learning by doing)

Of all the ways of learning (reading, listening, watching), the most effective is by "doing." See Training Methods.

Learning by doing can include doing directly such as doing a task in the field under supervision by a trainer, or doing indirectly such as participating in a role playing session or simulation game.

GENDER

The word "gender" is used to distinguish between two categories, "masculine" and "feminine." It should not be confused with the word "sex" which is used to distinguish between "male" and "female."

Gender, and its interpretations of what constitutes masculine and feminine differ greatly between culture and culture, between community and community. Our concern with gender mainly is focused on how distinctions of gender affect the distribution of power, economic relations, and social distinctions.

These are important variables which affect communities, and affect the nature of the work of every mobilizer. A mobilizer must (as part of the requirement of learning about a community) understand what values, attitudes and conceptualizations are shared among community members.

A mobilizer must also work towards reducing unfair political and economic differences between the genders, as an important element of community empowerment. See the training module on Gender.  Also see: Age, Race and Sex.

IGNORANCE

One of the five major factors of poverty is ignorance. To many, the word "ignorant" is an insult. What we mean is simply that some people do not know some things; there is no shame in that.

Also know that ignorance and stupidity are very different things. Adults can learn, but do not treat them as children or as inferior, or you will block their learning.

Ignorance means not knowing something, stupidity means not being able to know something, and foolishness means doing or not doing something when one knows better. Ignorance, stupidity and foolishness are very different things.

MOBILIZE

To mobilize is to produce action of a group or community.

Stimulation. Not exactly the same as organize, because action has to take place (people become mobile, moving) before it can be called mobilization.

It can be spelled "mobilise." Similar to social animation, except animation includes both the mobilizing and the organizing.  See "Action.

MOBILIZER

A mobilizer is a person who mobilizes, ie gets things moving. Social animator. Community development officer or assistant.

Community worker. Activist. Community participation promoter. See: To Be a Mobilizer.

MONEY

Money and wealth are not the same. Money is a cultural symbol that everyone must believe in if it is to be useful.

It can be used as a measure of wealth, a method of transferring or exchanging wealth, and a way to store wealth. (See "wealth," and Principles of Wealth).

Money is not wealth.

MUSHROOM TREATMENT

How do you raise mushrooms? You "keep them in the dark and feed them cow manure."

This is a slang phrase meaning the opposite of transparency.

Usually a more rude phrase for male bovine fæces is used instead of "cow manure".

POVERTY

Poverty is more than a lack of money and income, more than lack of access to facilities and services such as water, roads, education or clinics. It is the result of “poverty of spirit” ie an attitude of hopelessness, an ignorance of available resources, a dependence upon others, lack of confidence, discouragement, lack of skills, lack of trust, lack of integrity and lack of effective sustainable organization; in short, lack of good management. See Factors of Poverty.

Poverty is a social problem, and calls for a social solution; poverty is not merely the lack of income among a collection of individuals. Poverty can be reduced by organizing and guiding poor people towards helping themselves, and by getting stronger (empowerment) as a result of engaging in struggles and meeting challenges. The eradication of poverty, therefore, calls upon a sustainable improvement in management.

POVERTY ALLEVIATION

The word “alleviation,” means to temporarily take away pain and discomfort. Giving money to poor people does not end poverty.

As mobilizers dedicated to fighting the causes not the symptoms of poverty, we avoid this approach (mere alleviation by transferring money).

POVERTY ERADICATION

As mobilizers, we work towards the elimination of the social problem of poverty by analysing its causes, and taking steps to oppose and remove those causes. Since poverty is a social problem, the solution to that problem is social.

Two complementary approaches to poverty elimination (communal and private) are found in two complementary modules here: Community Mobilization Cycle, and Income Generation Scheme.

POVERTY REDUCTION

The word "reduction" means to make something smaller. See Principles of Community Empowerment.

In contrast to “alleviation” which temporarily treats the symptoms of poverty, reduction is seen as on the right pathway towards eradication.

PRIMARY HEALTH CARE

The concept of primary health care, promoted and supported by WHO, is a package of policies and practices that are of particular interest to poor people and to people in low income nations.

The principles in that package include putting an emphasis onto spending on low cost health care for the common diseases, which affect the majority of the population, rather than putting scarce resources into high cost, sophisticated (eg high tech) curative practices that benefit only the rich.

It also recognizes that prevention is much cheaper than cure, that it results in less mortality (death rate) and morbidity (illness rate) which put strains on the economy, and is more humane.

It includes the notion that many persons can be trained to low levels of medical skills who can reach more remote areas of the country, and who can refer difficult cases to more highly trained professional in urban areas.

The notion of PHC is important to mobilizers in poor countries, as it needs to be understood by all people, and it is a more efficient way of allocating limited resources.

The principles lying behind PHC are also applicable to other community based activities, such as community based social work. See the acronym PHC.

SOCIAL ANIMATION

Social animation means to put some life ("anima") into a social institution such as a community.

Usually called "Animation" (not to be confused with making animated cartoons for the cinema). See Animation.

STRENGTHENING

Empowerment. Increasing capacity or ability to achieve objectives.

Make stronger.

© Copyright 1967, 1987, 2007 Phil Bartle
Web Design by Lourdes Sada

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Last update: 2012.10.23