1. Don’t be a spokesperson for the community you’re working with
Our philosophy is to build leadership within the community. To do this, we start by using collective processes to develop an understanding of the communities’ needs. We then provide them with the tools, technical support, and guidance they need to build leadership skills.
By building leaders within communities, we are ensuring that our programmes can eventually be handed back to them, and run independent of us.
It is also important to remember who these leaders are. Just as the leaders of the Dalit movement will be Dalits, and queer people lead the LGBTQ+ movement, women must lead the women’s movement. There will be others who join as allies, but women need to be at the forefront – they must feel empowered to speak up and be the voice of the movement.
2. Stay true to your vision
Sometimes when working with communities it is easy to get swayed from the purpose of your organisation.
For example, our mission at Jagori is to empower and inform women who are disenfranchised. Despite this, we once found ourselves in a situation where we had to pull a very successful programme out of a BPL (Below Poverty Line) community. Here’s what happened: A few years ago, we started working in a BPL community where the women were predominantly employed as domestic workers. After we started working with them, we realised that these women were already quite vocal, had access to resources, and knew how to negotiate to improve their living conditions. We had wrongly assumed that since it was a BPL community, the women would be marginalised and would benefit from our efforts.
It would have been very easy to show change, in a short time duration in that community, but our vision is to create change in the most marginalised communities. And to stay true to that vision, we had to withdraw from this community so that we could focus our resources where they were most needed.
Ordinary people, extraordinary power
3. Create space for sustainable change
When working to change mindsets amongst communities, it is important to remember that you’re not challenging people’s experiences or identities. What you are challenging are their thoughts and opinions. And to do that effectively, it is very important to create a space where people can voice those opinions, disagree with each other, and even criticise you.