Civic engagement
Agenda
The Civic Engagement Training is based on approach to build leadership that scales up from the personal to the civic group using personal practice, dialogue, facilitation and the co-creation of innovation to address complex challenges in local Gagauz communities.
During previous trainings participants gained knowledge and tools how to identify local problems in communities, how to recruit new volunteers and members willing to be engaged in campaigns to solve local problems.
Objective of upcoming training is to designing the intervention itself.
- What kind of conversation is needed?
- How have participants been involved up to now?
- What do they know and what do they need to know?
- What will make this a conversation that really matters and leads to worthwhile results?
- The flow of the time together and the blending of processes creates the conditions for people to participate well together.
Trainer and participants would look carefully at which methods might work best and when. They would create a conversational flow that will help people get to know each other, be clear about why this topic matters to them, listen carefully to informational inputs and each other, work together on meeting their challenges and taking hold of opportunities and leave clear about what will happen next.
Expanding the zone of personal responsibility
The goal: to help young people expand their social responsibility and to notice how they can influence society and change their environment for the better.
We learn to take responsibility not only for ourselves, but for the people who surround us. We learn to take responsibility for solving the problems of our country. Yes, we perfectly understand that we can not solve them all, but at least we will not sit idly by and waiting for someone to come and decide everything for us. Because this will never happen. We will act and do something small that we can do.
So, how to ensure a promising future for your people and for your country? How not to be only a dreamer about changes, but to implement them? How not to become a pessimist and not lose faith in the possibility of change? This will be a lesson.
In our opinion, there are at least three things that anyone who dreams of a brighter future should do, not only for themselves, but at least for their loved ones.
Everyone should define his own area of social responsibility. For this you need to understand both that which has no direct relationship to you, and that which requires your direct involvement. There are so many things that are not in the zone of our direct duties or competence. We do not have to decide them, or they can not do it. In such cases it is necessary to honestly admit that the task posed is superior to us. In other situations, you need to expand your area of responsibility and not to reduce it solely to the family or to your personal gain.
Of course, even assuming a large responsibility for the whole country, you can not immediately change everything and make your country better. But, expanding its area of responsibility, you can perceive the problems of a country or city no longer as something that does not apply to you, but as an opportunity to do even something small to improve the situation.
We want everyone to think of themselves as an active and important member of society. Yes, we may not have so many powers yet, but now we can develop in ourselves the qualities and relationships that will allow us to influence what is happening around us.
Today we stressed the need to expand our social responsibility zone. Let what is happening in your country and city not only outrages you, but also pushes you to concrete actions that are within your power.
Strategies for social intervention
Sometimes it may appear that it is not necessary to help people very simply and do not need special knowledge. But this is not so. Moreover, not every help provided even from the best of motives will be useful to a person. Sometimes help can hurt him. Let us give an example. A middle-aged man comes to you and asks you to give him or even lend him a certain amount of money, since he has nothing to feed his family. Suppose he has health problems, but they are not so serious that he could not work. Your help causes dependence in it. Sometimes a denial of help can serve as an even stronger motivation for development and work on oneself than direct help.
Another example might be working with people with disabilities. Sometimes by helping them, you are really filled with compassion and you begin to feel sorry for them. But pity is what they least expect of themselves. Pity once again emphasizes their inferiority. They want to be treated like everyone else. That they were challenged to be laughed at. It is often not easy to make a difference between compassion and pity, and such people feel it very acutely. So one enthusiasm is not enough. Certain skills are also needed. In this lesson we’ll look at the minimum set of strategies that can be taken for social intervention.
Given the complexity of choosing the right approach to social intervention, it is necessary to point out the main strategies that can be taken to solve social problems.
1) Charity.
Charity is the provision of unselfish (free or concessional) assistance to those who need it.
Sometimes you can hear that charity is not the best strategy for social intervention. Like, it is better to teach a person to fish, instead of giving him what has already been cooked. In this there is some truth. Sometimes charity can do more harm than help.
But there are situations when charity is simply necessary. As a rule, we are talking about cataclysms or force majeure circumstances, such as fires, floods, epidemics, wars, drought, famine. At such times, all efforts should be directed to eliminating the consequences of cataclysms and returning to normal life. Every responsible citizen can take responsibility to help those in need. At such times charity will be the best method of work.
Another reason for charity may be the crisis situation in which the man turned out to be. Loss or illness of someone close, temporary disability, physical limitations (disability), unfair treatment or exploitation, etc. In a word, when a person can not help himself. Imagine a situation where a social educator with hungry talks about the importance of finding a job and discovering his potential, working in his specialty. The hungry need food. First you need to feed it, then you can think about other strategies.
So, the main goal of charity is to provide the needy with urgent and adequate help, and if possible, eventually, to withdraw it from the state of need. Charity persists for as long as the crisis situation persists, as soon as the situation improves, the form of social intervention must be revised, otherwise there is the danger of causing dependence on constant assistance and atrophying the recipient’s personal initiative and responsibility for their lives.
2) Education.
Education is a systematic approach to complex problems that can not be solved by one-time assistance. These are problems whose solution requires a change in the level of thinking. It is this change that the strategy is designed to provide.
Examples of such a strategy include rehabilitation centers for drug addicts and alcoholics, family-type children’s homes, so-called transition houses, in which graduates of boarding schools undergo social adaptation. B All of the above groups of people will not have the same material assistance. There are cases when graduates of boarding schools receiving huge money, or even their own housing, “lowered” money for a very short time to absolutely unnecessary things, and their habitation turned into a “pigsty”. Such people, first of all, need to be helped to get rid of the wrong attitudes that have been formed in them for years, from the victim’s syndrome and hatred to everyone around them. Then they need to be taught how to manage money, work and take responsibility for what their future lives will be. This is what the educational strategy provides.
Another example of this strategy is the professional courses that are provided to the unemployed, in order to acquire skills that will enable them to find a job in the foreseeable future. These are also centers of creativity that help the socially vulnerable to look at themselves from the other side and reveal their inner potential. These are also educational programs within the framework of which lectures are held to raise awareness of such problems as drug addiction, AIDS, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, opposition to manipulation and critical thinking.
Undoubtedly, the educational strategy requires more effort and sometimes more time. But it is simply indispensable when it comes to changing the worldview of the beneficiary.
3) Activism
Activism is actions aimed at social, political, economic or other changes in their country, undertaken on their own initiative, regardless of state power. Expressed in various forms, such as: letters of protest, pickets, marches, demonstrations, strikes, hunger strikes, boycotts, etc.
In general, any society is inert enough. Change is not something that is easily perceived or welcomed by the majority. Often people prefer to go with the flow, and at such moments when the society “has fallen asleep” and does not pay attention to acute and pressing problems, or when the power structures openly ignores the interests of the people or make unjust decisions, this strategy is necessary. It is designed to attract public attention to the most pressing problems and encourage action.
But I want to warn you right away. We are not just talking about riots or protests for the sake of protests or an empty sensation. The choice of this strategy requires very thorough preparation. First, it is necessary to formulate your position, your message or requirements very clearly. Blurring of positions, disagreements in the ranks of organizers, irrelevance of the message are those things that can nullify the success of the action.
Then you need to be very clear about how exactly the position you have developed will be heard. It is very important to creatively approach this issue. Sometimes a theatrical performance can do much more than chanting abstract slogans. There are cases when the shares caused a backlash. It is important to think through all the details, predict the possible reaction of people and do everything legally, so that law enforcement bodies had no grounds to regard the action as a violation of public order.
Activists are not necessarily desperate people, but rather those who have clear positions, who know what they stand for and for what they all do. Who are willing to pay a certain price for what they believe.
Within the framework of this strategy, it is also possible to organize various round tables, press conferences, briefings on which one or another position will be clearly and reasonably presented.
So, despite the fact that the conduct of the action is a rather laborious process, and its results are sometimes difficult to anticipate, in situations where it is necessary to raise public opinion and awaken people’s consciousness, activism is perhaps the best strategy.
4) Advocacy: protection of public interests.
Advocacy is a term that means a campaign aimed at representing and protecting the rights and interests of a particular social group. In Russian, this term does not yet have an established equivalent (it can be passed on as advocacy, advocacy, advocacy, advocacy, promotion, lobbying). The impact of the campaigns is public institutions (organizations); The purpose of the impact is the implementation of certain structural changes (for example, the adoption of laws) with respect to the group whose interests are thus defended.
As can be seen from the definition, this strategy aims to achieve structural changes. Thus, the fate of not only a single person, but society as a whole, is decided. Examples include initiatives to abolish the death penalty, demands for guaranteed protection of victims of trafficking in human beings, the demand for increased penalties for child pornography involved in the production, initiatives to detect torture and inhuman treatment of prisoners, revision of the policy of allocating social benefits, etc. Such problems require attracting qualified specialists who can thoroughly outline the position of “weak” and offer system solutions.
In addition to defending the interests of the group, this strategy is also used to protect individuals. For example, disabled people, children, socially vulnerable people who need to defend their rights before government structures. There are cases in which a human rights defender helped to siphon off housing that was illegally taken away, helped to restore documents or resume receiving state subsidies.
So the complex problems that require structural changes require the involvement of this strategy.
There are different strategies. Each has its pros and cons. Everything depends on the goals that we pursue and on the changes that we want to see.
AGENDA: GYLP_Civic Engagement_Training III.