Community Involvement

Sitting through a lessons learnt workshop of EHA HIV AIDS Project (Project Orchid) it was heartening to know that their involvement has led to empowering many marginalized communities.
How does a Christian Community involvement – the ideal - should look like?

Our role as individuals and organizations would be to facilitate people to “come together” or “community building” in communities. Most of the communities though there are various groups, there is no actual feeling of togetherness or community. This building of relationships and community creation has to be an on-going work and process till communities become “caring” and “compassionate” with each other. This happens only through on going “capacity building” both for coming together and taking up specific issues of concern as they identify.

As we interact with communities, we need to cover “critical mass” and key groups who need to be catered to. The coverage has to be such that, key indicators of health and or development in the communities are impacted over time.

We should have courage to innovate and cross boundaries or paradigms we hold on for a greater purpose of facilitating the transformation we want to facilitate. We should continue to persevere till we start seeing signs of change and ownership emerge within communities and there is enough momentum created to take the process forward.

The interventions we are involved in has to be comprehensive, health with all its social determinants or other factors which will influence the key population or issue at hand. This cannot be generic, but context and content specific.

The motivation of our involvement has to be the “care” and “compassion” which we have in our heart. This comes from a connectedness to Christ and a “constraint of Christ’s love”.

Can we create inner and external indicators to assess all our involvement with communities against some of these key principles?