Community Empowerment; Introduction to Module How do we assist low income communities to become stronger? by Phil Bartle, PhD Module Introduction Documents Included in this Empowerment Module: Community Empowerment, making neighbourhoods stronger; Factors of Poverty; The Big Five, attack causes, not symptoms; People Development, Not Hardware, human scale, not technology, Handout; Revealing Hidden Resources, sustainable development, avoiding charity Twelve Lessons, learned by the Community Development Programme of Habitat; Culture and Social Animation, a taste of social science theory for the field worker; Politics and Mobilization Training, roles of politics in community empowerment; Go to the People, poem by Lao Tsu. "The virtue of adversity is fortitude." Francis Bacon Empowerment Methodology: The training material on these pages is aimed at attacking poverty on two levels, the individual level, where organizing a credit organization and training in micro-enterprise is featured, and at the community level, where mobilization and management training are aimed at empowering low income communities. Since this training material is aimed at the community field worker, it minimises history and theory, and emphasises skills, techniques and programmes. For those who recognise it, the theory behind all the skills and techniques on these pages, is sociological. The successful community worker can not do the best job, however, unless she or he is familiar with some of the basic principles that lie behind the offering of skills or describing the programmes to be set up. Two modules are therefor presented here to simplify and describe those basic principles, without getting too academic and theoretical. The attack on poverty on the individual front, leading to forming a credit organization and offering micro enterprise training, is the focus of the module, Introduction to Income Generation Principles. The attack on poverty at the communal level is the focus of this module. In both the approaches, communal and micro-enterprise, the theme is the same. It is built up of several important principles: (1) while assistance is offered, it is not charity assistance which promotes dependency and weakness, but assistance and training that promotes self reliance and increased capacity; (2) organisms become stronger by exercising, struggling, and facing adversity, and empowerment methodology incorporates this principle; (3) Hands on participation by the recipients is essential for their increase in capacity; (4) we aim at the participants taking full control, full decision making, and full responsibility for the actions which will lead to their increased strength. The stage for this module is set by Community Empowerment, (making neighbourhoods stronger). Among the web pages in this module, Factors of Poverty; The Big Five, urges that the attack should be on the causes, not symptoms, or poverty, it is to be eliminated and not merely temporarily alleviated. The People Development, Not Hardware handout, argues that development, and development assistance should be "human scale," not large scale technology development, which has been shown to not lead to sustainable development. The paper, Revealing Hidden Resources, examines the principles leading to sustainable development, by avoiding charity, by identifying and using local resources. The Culture and Social Animation paper is a taste of social science theory for the field worker. See also "What is Community?" The Go to the People poem by Lao Tsu is a call for participation, involvement and respect for the beneficiaries of development assistance. You are also invited to look at Introduction to Income Generation Principles, for related and complementary principles of empowerment. If you copy any text from this site, please link it back to www.scn.org/cmp/ Updated: 2003 May 12