How can we build trust and inclusivity in our communities today? How can we invite people from across the community, people with different lived experience and/or divergent views, to engage in dialogue and citizen-led action? How can we help neighbors open up to one another despite their differences?
Community Alphabet is an international long-term peer learning program for community leaders and practitioners in Central, Eastern & Southern Europe who are interested in inclusive participatory processes. Through the program, they deepen their knowledge, build skills and reflect on their practice together. The program is based on learning by doing and individual and peer reflection on practice.
We have just completed a 3-year pilot program and hope to open a new program call in late February 2023.
FRAGMENTATION AND SOCIAL BUBBLES
The Community Alphabet program responds to the growing fragmentation between different groups in society. As people close themselves off in bubbles where they confirm their own opinions, they become less willing to engage in constructive dialogue about common issues with people from other bubbles. On the local level this can make it difficult to work collaboratively to improve the community.
2020-2022 PILOT PROGRAM
Through the 2020-2022 Community Alphabet pilot program, we guided 26 program managers and community development practitioners from three non-profit organizations from Serbia, Hungary and the Czech Republic (TRAG Fondacija, Via Foundation and Közösségfejlesztők Egyesület – Köfe/Hungarian Association for Community Development) in advancing their knowledge and skills around inclusive community building, participatory mapping, resilience and conflict/tension transformation. The pilot program included online and in-person workshops, a site visit, peer exchange and support and staff guidance to participants as they applied the learning to their practice.
The pilot program participants are incorporating the ABCD approach, mapping and conflict/tension analysis into their support of communities through e.g.:
- Asset mapping in a village, which then enabled quick mobilization of resources to help Ukrainian refugees
- Development of a network of community leaders across a city to share knowledge, contacts and equipment
- Mobilization of local assets in a community school garden project, which was so successful that an external grant remained unspent and citizens continued to think of solutions using their own resources
- Mapping to identify resources and create a sense of belonging in a village museum project
- UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) Czechia creation of podcast about migrant integration based on the ABCD approach of identifying and appreciating local resources
- Use of ABCD principles in Agency for Social Inclusion – Via supported projects in socially excluded localities in the Czech Republic
PROGRAM VISION
We seek to help ensure that community initiatives in Central, Eastern & Southern Europe have the knowledge, tools and support to confidently pursue inclusive participatory processes with communities so that they can, over the longer-term, play a meaningful role in developing places where:
- people with different opinions and lifestyles work towards shared community goals in an environment of listening, trust, respect and mutual recognition,
- people thrive on a shared yet inclusive identity and strong sense of belonging,
- people enhance the community through use of local skills and resources,
- and people assume shared responsibility.
PROGRAM CONTENT
Through the program, participants:
- are exposed to community building approaches that are inclusive, participatory and asset-based and skills to help pax work within communities (mapping, trust-building, dealing with tensions/conflicts, etc.)
- engage with other people doing community building across Europe for support, including national, regional and/or cross-country interaction to further pax projects and/or pursue common interests
- explore their own role in community building and ways of approaching work with communities
- test community building ideas and practices in pax communities
- develop a resource tool for additional community practitioners, leaders and citizens/citizen initiatives outside of the program
READING MATERIALS
We invite you to read some of the materials produced within the program:
- a case study on a participant’s project to create a network of community leaders in her city
- an article about one of the pilot program workshops by two participants
- Changing the paradigm: Reflections on Community Support in Three Central and Eastern European Non-profit Organizations, which details how Via, TRAG and HACD support communities (2020)