Reawakening the Community Engagement Skills of Community Facilitators
Civil Society Organizations in Uganda are at a juncture where they need to search for new and innovative ways to influence development processes and policies for the betterment of the community.
UNNGOF, under its Philanthropy for Development Programme, has now set out a bold move to influence how development is done by building a strong culture of giving that expresses the aspirations of the citizenry and increases domestic giving in communities. One pathway to achieving this is through training community facilitators from the Regional Advocacy Networks as champions at the community level.
As part of igniting communities to give towards their development, community facilitators were trained in Mobilizing Support (MS) from 28th March to 1st April. This course prepares them to convene constructive engagements between citizens and their leaders. The training was adapted to the relevancy of the facilitators.
Throughout the 5-day training, community facilitators were able to appreciate the value of setting a vision for the community, use of a problem/solution tree analysis, the tactics and principles of MS, stakeholder mapping, the public policymaking process, and negotiation skills as they set out for different community engagements.
In addition to this, they appreciated the need to create safe spaces during their community engagements as the training mode created a space for talking about gender issues and promoted gender participatory approaches during group work.
During this training, the community facilitators were revealed to have unconsciously practiced these Mobilising Support concepts in their work. The sessions covered helped to reawaken their skills and further professionalize their mode of engagement.
The confidence and passion of the community facilitators were built to enable them engage in community spaces like fireplace conversations and community dialogues. These spaces will help to amplify citizens’ voices to claim their rights through community philanthropy.
