The Rural Community Building Approach: Source of Inspiration for ANDARES
The Ford Family Foundation’s Rural Community Building Approach has been a central source of inspiration for ANDARES. The approach is a practical representation of the principles of community-led and asset-based community development, which is what constitutes the guiding framework for our organization.
The key question we ask ourselves is ‘How do we put into practice our mission of fostering resilience and community building by honoring people’s wisdom, skills, and culture?’ The Rural Community Building Approach provides guidance, by putting the community, with all of its social and cultural complexity, including its needs and assets, at the center of the community building process. This may seem obvious, but in the world of service provision that is not always the case: on occasions, an externally defined ‘need’ is at the center of the process.
The eight practices that make up the Rural Community Building Approach are very concrete actions through which ANDARES can accomplish its mission:
Listen to learn
Transform
Celebrate and reflect
Create change
Plan together
Develop skills and networks
Engage to mobilize
Come together.
Central to these eight practices are the fundamental role of people’s voices and of engaging in participatory processes. How can we listen to learn? How can we engage people in participatory planning, decision making, and implementation processes? These are questions that can be addressed through methodologies (and philosophies) such as popular education and participatory-action research.
To learn more about the Ford Family Foundation’s Rural Community Building Approach, visit the Foundation’s website at https://www.tfff.org/rural-community-building/. Below is the graphical representation of the approach, as a bilingual English-Spanish wheel, with the approach principles at the center, the four purposes of the approach around it, and the eight practices in the outer circle.
The ANDARES team is fully optimistic about the power of people’s voices and the potential for true engagement. It is all a matter of doing it.
