USEFUL LINKS

Barry Oshry has studied organizational systems for many years. He says that within each system, there are "tops", "middles", "bottoms", and "customers", each with their own challenges. At the top, the challenge is complexity; at the bottom, it is finding a way to get beyond the sense of "being done to", and in the middle, it is the challenge of feeling torn between the demands of top and bottom. Customers face the challenge of having their needs met while the organization is wrapped up in its own internal challenges. Oshry has written a number of books about what he has learned.

Community Development Resource Association, Cape Town, South Africa - CDRA works with groups throughout southern Africa, emphasizing "horizontal learning" - local people learning from each other - rather than "vertical learning", which usually involves having professionals "teach" people how to do local development. Its site offers many resources that can be downloaded.

Future search is a planning meeting that helps peopletransform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. It brings together 60 to 80 people in one room or hundreds in parallel rooms. Future search brings people from all walks of life into the same conversation - those with resources, expertise, formal authority and need. They meet for 16 hours spread across three days. People tell stories about their past, present and desired future. Through dialogue they discover their common ground. Only then do they make concrete action plans. The meeting design comes from theories and principles tested in many cultures over the past 50 years. It relies on mutual learning among stakeholders as a catalyst for voluntary action and follow-up. People devise new forms of cooperation that continue for months or years. Future searches have been run in every part of the world and sector of society.

Monitoring Change

Tracking changes that come about through empowerment or other community development programs has been a perennial challenge for international development activities. One effective way to do this is by collecting the stories of the most significant changes that people identify in their communities as a result of such projects. Terry Bergdall did work on this area in Ethiopia; so have Rick Davies and Jess Dart. Their guide to how to use the MSC technique can be downloaded from www.mande.co.uk/docs/MSCGuide.htm.

Resources about Open Space

Open Space Technology is a method that allows large groups of people, brought together by a specific question, to generate their own agenda and quickly organize themselves into groups for detailed discussion. It has been used in both the business and NGO worlds, and was used in western Serbia in 2002 in a session led by Harrison Owen himself.

Story-telling in business

Anecdote is an Australian firm known for its work in knowledge management, collaboration, leadership development and facilitating complex change initiatives. It works in Australia, New Zealand, the U.S, Canada, UK and Southeast Asia. Business narrative involves collecting and listening to people’s stories in the workplace and using these stories to understand what is really happening. This process creates the conditions for people to work together to solve what seemed like intractable problems. Leaders can also learn to tell better stories and improve their ability to explain their organization's values and beliefs.  Anecdote has many resources on its site, and you can subscribe to its newsletter by email.

Asset-based Community Development

Asset-based community development is an approach pioneered by John McKnight and John Kretzmann of the ABCD Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago; the results of their work now span the world.

The traditional approach to community development is to focus on a community’s needs and to try to address those deficiencies with outside experts and resources, a scenario that leads to greater dependency and is not sustainable.

The ABCD approach genuinely empowers citizens and strengthens the effectiveness of government and other agencies by drawing on the resources, abilities and insights of local residents to solve their own problems. Outside assistance is still needed, but genuine community development must be citizen-led with external resources acting in a support role.

ABCD International Consultancy believes that asset-based community development is the most effective approach to poverty, climate change, violence, social disintegration and the other major challenges found throughout the world. Jim Diers, Cormac Russell and Ted Smeaton are experienced change agents from three continents who use the ABCD methodology to identify, connect and mobilise community and agency resources in order to address these challenges in ways that are bottom-up and citizen-driven.

Through presentations, workshops and technical assistance, we demonstrate how the ABCD approach can multiply available resources and result in actions that are culturally appropriate, broadly supported, holistic and sustainable.

What is ABCD?