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SEAPCP (Southeast Asia Popular Communications Programme)¡¯s
10-day community organizing training course ¡°Community Organizing:
Approach to Attain Millennium Development Goals¡± was started in
Bali on November 11. This course is following two fairly new lines
of approach: the ¡®Rights-Based Approach to Community Organizing¡¯
and ¡®Millennium Development Goal Amidst Global Challenges.¡¯
The training course focuses on following different aspects of community organizing
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Approaching the people
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| 20 participants exchsanging
stories and experiences through creative materials |
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Facilitating the community
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Use of creative & effective popular communications
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Effective analyses of issues & situations
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Strategizing for collective action
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Mobilizing the community
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Organizational set up & organizations
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Sustainability & income generation
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| group dynamics to learn about MDG and community
organising |
SEAPCP is a group of Southeast Asian civil organizations based
in Jakarta, Indonesia with the objective of strengthening and
supporting grassroots organizations to develop their community
organizing (CO) perspective & skills. This includes learning
creative media, strategizing and tactics, and setting up systems.
SEAPCP also helps its partners develop their capacity to generate
financial support for local programme activities.
This is not the first time that SEAPCP provides CO training to
activists. Two years ago, SEAPCP and its partner organizations
agreed to establish a training course. The main goal of this course
is to spread the approach and concept of CO to other grassroots
and NGOs outside of its network. Jo Hann Tan, the facilitator
of SEAPCP, said the training course is based on the 16-year field
experience, skills and practice of SEAPCP¡¯s network. Since the
training is shaped for sharing collective knowledge, the targeted
participants of this course are people who work with local communities
and are in decision-making positions in their grassroots organizations.
Myo Min Aung, the resource person of SEAPCP, a moderator of the
workshop entitled; ¡°Linking HR and MDG: Rights Based Approach
to Development, The Role of Community Organizing¡±, said many local
issues are now related to international issues and various actors.
For this reason, grassroots organizations need to also have discussions
at an international level so that they can push their governments
and local communities.
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| Nani Zulminarni resource person shares about
MDG and community organising |
Roem Topatimasang, Indonesian resource person discussing organising strategies |
Mr Suarnatha I Made, Direcotr of Wisnu Bali
Foundation the local host of the event |
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 10
days is short considering that if we take a university
course we take about 5 months or a semester. Here, we
want to teach people how to organize a community to
change lives, social conditions and society so 10 days
is actually short. The course has 4 parts. The first
is to share experiences, and establish a collective
understanding about community organizing. The second
part is to go to field areas to interact and observe
a community organizing experience firsthand. Then the
third part is learning the skills, such as basic community
facilitation skills, and creative media tools. The last
part is talking about sustainability, in terms of funding,
networking, support services which are needed for the
community organizing processes.
| Jo Hann Tan, Course director and facilitator on community organising |
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| creative games are powerful
tools for learning |
Rights based approach is not actually a new concept,
although the term is fairly new. Community organizing
dates back as of more than 100 years ago when groups
of people in Europe and America started to respond to
the developing society by organizing their urban communities
to respond to their needs such as lack of shelter, fair
wages, etc.
Now for the past
16 years, SEAPCP has been working with different grassroots
communities, and in fact have been using the rights-based
approach in all its work. To clearly spell it out
is only to describe our works with those terms.
Rights-based approach is actually being able to carry
out community transformation works taking into account
the holistic context of a society--that means not only
trying to solve the issues but also looking into the
long term and other values which are contained in that
society.
For example, when we organize a community to fight
for clean water we also must make sure the community
understands why they could not have clean water in
the first place, they have to do a deep analysis to
understand the root cause and then to see the water
problem within the perspective of the whole social
political economic situation.
The instruments of the UDHR is just merely an affirmation
that these values and issues are also shared by a
collective body in the world, and also pose as a standard
to measure human rights conditions.
This is the first time SEAPCP has opened up the course
outside of Southeast Asia, we have Mongolia, Japan,
Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, besides Southeast Asian
participants.
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As I have mentioned earlier, SEAPCP wants to spread
our approach of community organizing outside of our
network. We have many positive experiences to show us
in the past 16 years that what we have developed works
and is effective so it is good to spread outside of
our network members. This is our expectation from the
course.
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| participants from 11 countries exchage experiences in community organising |
We are a regional network. The role of the regional
network is to help support, enhance and empower the
members. The real work of advocacy, organizing and
promoting human rights is for the members to practice
on their local levels. But we intend to continue with
this yearly course and even expanding it to other
regions this time we have applications from Africa,
Europe, and the Middle East even though we had said
that the course is limited to Southeast Asia that
shows to us that there is such a great need for these
kinds of training and capacity-building for many social
activists and grassroots facilitators out there.
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| young cambodian organiser shares his experiences |
Like I said, we have plans to expand our skills, experiences
and knowledge outside of SEA and we definitely have
ideas to expand our networking to other parts of Asia
but we have to be careful not to overstretch and also
consider the limited resources. However, the approach
we have used in SEAPCP is based on shared responsibilities
to the point that the network members have strong commitment
to also help raise funds, and support the networking
in their own ways, thereby limiting the need for the
regional secretariat to be with many staff members or
have a lot of administrative and coordinating role to
play.
We are already collaborating with ASPBAE (Asian South
Pacific Bureau of Adult Education) on education and
indigenous issues, and our members are also strongly
networking with different regional bodies on a host
of different issues.
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Myo Min Aung,
Resource Person of SEAPCP |
The world is changing. Yes, grassroots organization
had worked on its own local issues but at the same time,
they have started thinking of the relation of their
local issues with the changing world trend. There are
many local issues which are related with the global
issue, such as poverty and globalization, local environment
issues and TNCs (The Nature Conservancy), etc. Thus,
we have to analyze our own community issues, of course,
but when we identify the actors of the issues, there
are not only the local actors at the national levels
but also international levels. Therefore we need to
discuss what is going on at the international levels
as well as the current trends that encourage local government
to respect, protect, promote and fulfill the rights
of the local people.
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MDG are the development goals and urged the commitment
of the governments to work on achieving these goals.
In order to fulfill all these development goals, we
need the governments¡¯ commitment and appropriate strategies
and implementation.
A rights-based approach to development
sets the achievement of human rights as an objective
of development. It uses a focus on human rights as
the scaffolding of development policy.
While thinking of appropriate strategies for achieving
MDG, it is important to analyze based on the realization
of human rights, to have a meaningful participation
of stakeholders at each stage and to utilize mechanisms
of accountability. Also, the government must understand
that poverty alleviation is not merely a development
issue and poverty eradication as a matter of social
justice and dignity. Their efforts should extend from
a state-centered approach to participatory, multi-actor
approaches involving media, corporation, communities
and individuals.
Implementation of strategies also must not be based
on charity since this approach focuses on exclusion,
inequality and discrimination.
Thus, RBA is very crucial help in achieving MDG.
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Our grassroots-based community organizing activities
are the ¡®bricks and mortar¡¯ of civil society development
that promotes democracy from ¡®below¡¯.
Human rights awareness and empowerment is an essential
ingredient in a movement which demands not only a change
in leadership but also lasting justice and equality
in a society. By knowing their rights, people start
to value their life and a meaningful existence. By empowering
them, they will stand up for what they lacked and better
participate in defining what justice and equality means
in practical terms. This will not only make the movement
stronger by growing rights actions, but also establishes
a civil society and sustainable civil society participation.
Forming a civil society that aspires human rights and
development will positively contribute to good governance
in addressing the root causes of poverty and determining
long-term development priorities and strategies.
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| resource person Aung Myomin from Burma shares about rights based approach and community organising |
Many of the participants see clearly how the RBA is
similar to the community organizing strategies, in principle.
However, there are some cases where RBA did not fit,
such as with emergency relief. In practice, one will
not get around the prioritizing of the many rights:
the right to food is classified higher than health.
In case of emergency, a person could survive with a
sickness but not without food. Currently more is being
spent internationally - which is undeniably important-
for AIDS prevention than for stopping starvation.
In a number of countries, the existence of a law system
does not ensure the RBA¡¯s implementation-- corruption
of the law or political arbitrariness disablees the
system. For RBA to function, both the law system and
the civil society needs to be strengthened.
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2007 SEAPCP Community Organizing Course ended on November 20.
For more information,
please
visit SEAPCP website.
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| lighted floats symbolise asian people's unity in the opening
ceremony |
Prepared by Yejin Heo, BASPIA
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