Anatomy of a Project (Vol. 2) - Community Development...The Goal

This may sound strange, but the driving force behind my work in Nicaragua has nothing to do with charity.  I don’t try to live up to any altruistic ideal where my primary goal is to “give stuff to the needy.”  When I say that my work has nothing to do with charity, I really mean it in the sense that it has nothing to do with giving handouts or saving souls.  I've learned that the most important and fundamental thing in this type of work, the thing that resides at the heart of it, is the value of real human connections.

For me, the experience of Peace Corps is about being with people different from yourself.  It’s about discovering the commonalities that make us all human.  It’s about learning from other people’s points-of-view in order to form a more realistic perspective of how your native country is perceived and the role it should play on the international stage.  It’s about making true friends with people who were born into a completely different society, culture, and religion than you.  It’s about sharing the best parts of U.S. society and culture.  It’s about helping your friends work to improve their own country, their own community, and their own life, not because it’s charitable and in fashion, but because they are your friends.

I want to make these ideas explicit because they exist behind everything I’m doing in my work in general and with the economical stove project in particular, and because they help form the theoretical basis for how a community development project ought to be designed.

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Good community development rejects the idea of giving handouts for the sake of giving handouts.  It involves community leaders, families and individuals and builds upon pre-existing social and economic structures.  Community members involved in such projects are expected to participate actively in all aspects of the project, and in so doing, gain transferable skills and experience.  A project that does not subscribe to these ideals will not be a good community development project, and for some people, will not be a good project, period.

I don’t want to say that all projects should adhere to the principles of community development, because there are plenty of good projects that define their goals differently, but I would argue that a solid community development project will be more likely to make a lasting difference for the people involved.  (I’ll expand on this point later on in the series in volume eight, Designing for Sustainability.)

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There is almost nothing that bums me out more than seeing a project that will probably never help a single Nicaraguan expand their horizons.  Usually the reason for failure is a lack of preparation, lack of materials, lack of clearly defined goals, and a misplaced sense of charity that sometimes looks curiously like vanity.

For example, I recently met a group of Social Work majors in Boaco who were traveling with their professor and working in coordination with an organization whose mission is apparently to help and support the forgotten elderly people of the world.  None of them spoke Spanish well enough to carry on a conversation and they were traveling without a translator.

Two of them had been to Nicaragua before but the rest had not.  They were all unfamiliar with the culture, the language, and the people in general, and were working without a guide.  To my understanding, their project was to visit elderly people in Boaco and in the giant trash dump in Managua in order to gather and record their personal stories.  They were also going to do a session about video editing with kids from ACJ (the YMCA) using the footage from their interviews.

It sounds like a neat idea on the surface, sure, but it turns out that it isn’t a very well designed project.  Apart from the general lack of preparedness, the plan also doesn’t take into account some other key considerations.

For one, the culture of Nicaragua is such that most elderly people are taken care of by their families and their children and their children’s families, and even by neighbors.  Old people are revered and venerated in Nicaragua in a way that they are not in the United States.  It follows then, that there really aren’t forgotten elderly people here like there are in the States and other countries.  An old person who is institutionalized in Nicaragua most likely has severe medical or psychological problems, and has not been ostracized from society on the basis of their age.

The other problem seems to be the idea of sharing video editing with the kids at the YMCA.  On the surface it seems great, kids will learn about an important communications skill, right?  Well, again, kinda…

There is the language barrier.  The editing program is in English, the kids speak Spanish, and there is no translator.  The whole session will be done with equipment brought from the States, so the group of ten or more kids will have to crowd around a laptop or two while a gringo fiddles with footage.  After the session is over, if the kids learned anything, they won’t be able to practice or put that knowledge to use because they won’t have access to cameras or editing software.

SO…I provide this example not to bash this group of well-meaning social workers, but to shed light on some of the difficulties that go into designing projects, and the need to give projects like these a focus on community development.  This project’s problem is that its scope and objectives seem hopelessly ungrounded.

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        The moral of the above cautionary tangent then, is that when designing a project you must have a working understanding of the culture and socioeconomic situation that exists in the place where you’re working.  Put in the time.  Listen and learn before you act.  Don’t assume things!

If you can’t spend the time yourself to learn about culture and socioeconomic situations, find an organization that has that expertise and work with them as a counterpart!  Always consider how the project will affect those involved, and make sure the goals are well defined, measurable, reachable, specific, and realistic.  And for goodness’ sake, make the project about the people, not about you.

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So my main point in this long, long post, is that in perfect world, a project should be focused on developing skills and capacities within a community, and it is with this goal in mind that I have designed the economical stove project with Alcance.

I want it to be clear that I will not simply be going to people’s houses with a truck full of materials, paying a guy to build a stove in their kitchens (or building them all myself), and moving on to the next house.  The project is designed to involve families in understanding and thinking critically about the problems they live with every day in using traditional cooking methods (more about this in volume four, The Problemática).  Those involved are thinking about the ways to improve (i.e. the stove model and why it’s good), and then working together as a community to make it all happen.  Our job, (mine and Alcance’s) is not to “do” the project, but to facilitate the project.  The community will be doing the “doing.”

     • (Vol. 1) – Intro to Economical Stoves
     • (Vol. 2) – Community Development…The Goal ***
     • (Vol. 3.1) – The Key Players
            (Vol. 3.2) - The Designers/Facilitators
            (Vol. 3.3) - The Community
     • (Vol. 4) – The Problemática
     • (Vol. 5.1) – The Stove Design
            (Vol. 5.2) - Materials and Design Elements

            (Vol. 5.3) - The Stovetops

            (Vol. 5.4) - The Table

            (Vol. 5.5) - The Stove Itself

            (Vol. 5.6) - The Chimney

     • (Vol. 6) – Community Workshops
     • (Vol. 7) – The Budget and Funding
     • (Vol. 8) – Designing for Sustainability

In the upcoming posts I’ll be describing in much more detail what we’ve done up to this point and how we’ve done it.  Also there will be pictures in volume three, I swear.  With this post I wanted to cover a bit of theory before moving on to some more of the practical stuff, so I hope I didn’t bore you too much.