Community Organizing in the Context of Social Mobilization

Prepared for the:
South Pacific Fourth Regional Workshop
on Health Education Methods and Techniques:
"Social Mobilisation and Marketing Perspective in the 1990s"

Prepared by:
Nestor M. Pestelos
Community Development Specialist/Trainer
UNDP-OPS Integrated Atoll Development Project
(RAS/88/014)
Suva, Fiji

Clarify CO as concept; its relation to social mobilisation

The community is always listed as a target for social mobilsation, along with policymakers and political leaders, planners, media practioners, businessmen and civic leaders, religious groups, government technical agencies, NGOs, fieldworkers and volunteers.

By that term is meant, usually, a single village, a district, a town, a city, a province, a region, a nation or nearer home, an atoll or island where the other socmob targets live. Hence, community refers to the basic population, the people themselves, or certain groups in a geographic area which must be reached with information/message/appeal and encouraged to act in concert towards some developmental ends, i.e. immunization campaigns, weighing of pre-schoolers, home gardening, mangrove replanting, preparing a community plan, identifying common problems, deciding on priority projects, etc.

In this context, community organizing refers to that process or methodology for motivating people to act as a group towards some developmental goals or objectives, which may include improving the overall health situation, reducing the number of malnourished children over time, increasing the number of home gardens or babai/pulaka pits, building more latrines, immunizing more children, helping the island council build an office, road, school building, maneaba, etc.

Within the socmob framework, what has been termed in most CO literature as people's empowerment, the end result of community organizing, should be understood in this sense, that of sustained collective action towards an improvement in the people's quality of life.

Profiling the community; implications to community organizing

The first thing to remember is: if we must mobilize the community, we must know it first.

That's why we have profiles, all kinds of community profiles, depending on who's making them: health, agriculture, fishery and other sectoral profiles; socio-economic profiles; integrated development profiles.

Or we can walk the site and note down our observations. Or we can conduct surveys, micro or macro; rapid assessment type; with or without questionnaires.

Or we can talk to people, either in more or less formal community assemblies, as in a maneaba, or informal dialogues under say, the scanty shade of a pandanus.

From the mass of data we've gathered, we seek to describe our target community, its characteristics, expressed in the language of such disciplines as public health, agriculture, sociology, anthropology, etc. Or in accordance with some planning format. The community is so rich and varied, it will not be enough for a single discipline to describe it. To know the community, we have to understand these data, their significance. Yes, everything is grist to the community organizer's mill.

In community organizing, this tedious knowing-the-community routine has one single purpose; it's how to determine the entry point for the mobilizing process, and for that matter, the entire change or development process. Simple task, but quite tricky, since each agency, project or NGO operating in a community will always claim its own programme to be the entry point. There are just too many entry points for the community to consider with its limited manpower, time and other resources. The community may get immobilized from the sheer weight of our concerns.

And that's the second thing to remember: before we set out motivating the community to get organized for some action, the minority, but quite influential, development subcommunity in an island or atoll should get itself mobilized first and agree on certain basic things before selling its perspective programmes as the one and only entry point for the community to consider.

Integration is the key to go. To make good at community organizing, we must first convince and mobilize our fieldworkers or community-based personnel to work together, look at the community as a whole and decide as genuine partners, on how to go about the business of organizing the community more effectively - and efficiently.

It doesn't mean organizing on the basis of sectoral concerns isn't good; in most communities, it's the only way to cope with myriad interests. What's being stressed is the need for an agreement, at best a dialogue, no matter how informal, among project functionaries on how to go about organizing the community - and eventually sharing this decision with the community itself.

Hence, the decision how to get organized for a project or activity is something shared between the development workers themselves and the people, through the Island Council or some representative body. People don's just wake up one fine morning, or late afternoon after a long nap, to find themselves members of some sort of groups organized by a government agency or that they have been enlisted to be members by local authorities without their active consent.

Locating community organizing as a component strategy of social mobilization vests it with the necessity to consider the lager picture. It can't limit itself to a single concern. The community we deal with is multisectoral in its concerns. Ultimately, al those who initiate the process at project level have to consider broader relationships, captured in such planners' jargons as linkages, networking, etc. if they have to make CO a viable strategy to mobilize people, empower them to make critical decisions and in the process, create and sustain focal points for decision-making for daily concerns, such as for health, food, technology, solar energy, marine conservation, etc.

In so far as it empowers the people to decide on their own, within a development framework, community organizing becomes a methodology not only for social mobilisation, but creative institution building.

To summarize:

In the context of social mobilisation, community organizing means

proceeding from a more or less thorough knowledge of the community, its problems and their possible causes; its development history; the concerns which have moved its critical mass from generation to generation; the state of its resource base; its culture and traditions; the institutions and their relative stability; the fears and the prospects for the future;
choosing the entry point which can tactically galvanize community-wide action, providing impetus to the overall development process rather than frustrate it with too narrow a perspective applied to sectoral projects;
generating "self-mobilisation" on the part of the community organizers and mobilizers, agreeing on a plan to involve the community on a basic decision of how to get organized;
catalyzing integration of programme concerns and services to match the multi-sectoral nature of local needs and thus ensure sustained community interests; and
initiating linkages and networking to facilitate institution building efforts.

Mobilising at local level; the CO process

Either at institutional or sectoral project level, the basic process remains the same. It consists of several phases, each phase containing a subset of logically-sequenced activities.

These phases are as follows:

3.1 Preparatory or Pre-mobilisation Phase
Activities
	3.1.1	Establishing the parameters for CO work (sectoral or generalized; institution-based or community-based; with or without volunteers, etc.); setting targets; identifying priority groups; clarifying goals and expected outputs; "strategizing"; assessing the project environment; determining institutional and administrative arrangements.
	3.1.2	Establishing contacts; "setting camp"; walking the site; drawing up tentative work plan; meeting "gatekeepers"; forging collegial ties with other development workers.
3.2 Formal Entry or Social Preparation Phase
	3.2.1	Profiling or social investigation; planning with the people and their partners in government, NGOs, traditional institutions; identifying priority problems; determining collective vision; assessing resources; assessing threats and opportunities in the task or project environment.
	3.2.2	Forming core groups to study specific problems; problem-solving activities; identifying formal and non-formal leaders; assessing strengths and weaknesses of local institutions, including indigenous organizations; identifying socially-disadvantaged groups; knowing the influentials and their hold on the levers of local political power.
	3.2.3	Intense training of all target groups; expanding core groups into community organizations; orientation or consultation meetings with the gatekeepers and influentials; deciding on priority projects; planning and organizing for action.
3.3 Mobilisation Phase

	3.3.1	Implementing projects; allocating manpower and resources; expanding the organization base through tasks; promoting improved technologies; setting up mechanisms for decision-making.
	3.3.2	Setting up monitoring and evaluation system, referral system; identifying new leaders.
	3.3.3	"Reaching the unreached"; providing a forum for those traditionally at the periphery.
3.4 Consolidation or Assessment Phase
	3.4.1	Assessing organizational performance vis-a-vis project goals and processes; identifying strengths and weaknesses of target groups based on performance during the previous phase; assessing institutional capabilities.
	3.4.2	Intensive remedial or skills training; revisions of plans at all levels; project assessment and preplanning.
	3.4.3	Evaluating the quality of CO work; summing-up lessons learnt; formulating corrective measures; revising training designs and operations guides.
	3.4.4	Preparing for renewal of the CO process, either through expansion to other geographic areas, linkages with other sectors, or engaging in new or related activities.

Planning the CO component; a few things to consider

Planning the CO component for a project or programme under a social mobilisation framework will have to consider the following:

4.1	Definition of "local" level; where mobilisation will occur; the area coverage; the "community" referred to in the project concept
4.2	The target groups; who will participate for which goals; who will be organized; characteristics of each group
4.3	Respective roles of each group; strengths and weaknesses; expected benefits from participation; expected outputs from getting organized
4.4	Who will initiate the CO process; "external" community organizer or from within the community; recruitment; training and deployment of volunteers; critical activities per step of the process
4.5	Participation of the poor, the marginal or socially-disadvantaged groups
4.6	Linkages with other organizations
4.7	Relationship with local institutions

Evaluating the CO component

What to consider:

5.1	Degree of community participation in the project
5.2	Broad representation in the organization formed
5.3	Clarity of purpose
5.4	Display of initiative and sustained action
5.5	Specific and immediate concerns
5.6	Full of use of available resources
5.7	Effective local leadership
5.8	Degree of self-reliance
5.9	Impact on community-perceived problems