Nurturing Facilitators

PCD believes that people are the key agents of change. Community facilitators at the local level are important in planting seeds for the desired changes to take root. They include individuals such as villagers, health practitioners, women’s affairs officials, teachers, young people and volunteers, who live and work within their own communities. Facilitators can also be civic groups and community-based organisations (CBOs) in urban and rural areas. They actively participate in building the capacity of their fellow community members. Good community facilitators cultivate an empowering environment where people are aware of socio-cultural and equity issues related to different development models and participate in and take responsibility for individual and collective development.

Through the training, exposure visits, workshops, exchanges and coaching carried out on a day-to-day basis as part of its programs, PCD enhances the capacity of facilitators on a wide range of issues such as sustainable agriculture, farmers’ co-operatives, good governance, and community-based health. In addition to supporting facilitators from the local communities, PCD also strives to develop supportive networks outside the communities, such as city-based and county-based volunteer networks.

Reflecting on Culture

Different communities live out their unique cultural wisdom. This cultural wisdom, formed as a response to the peculiarities of their local context, serves to guide people’s choices and behaviour in their interaction with one another and with nature. We have witnessed the resilience of local wisdom after having being sidelined in the sweeping trend of modernisation, uniformly replaced by the monolithic value of individualism, commercialisation and consumerism. Lives in both urban and rural areas have become more vulnerable and unsustainable as cultural diversity rapidly disappears.

To be able to rebuild an alternative and sustainable way of living, PCD believes that we have to understand, reflect on and appreciate values and practices deeply rooted in traditional cultures of rural community life. We aspire to go through such a reflective journey in partnership with local communities. We support people in upholding their principles and values and applying them in a way that enables sustainable living.

Different platforms are used to encourage reflection on the roots and basis of culture including community learning activities, participatory research, forums and workshops. These initiatives have raised awareness on issues related to the mainstream development model such as consumerism, polarising urban-rural relationships and chemical-intensive industrial farming, and have enhanced trust and compassion between different communities. Groups and individuals who participate in the process, including farmers, young people and community workers, have found that reflecting on culture, especially traditional cultural practices, is inspiring in fostering harmony among people, and between people and nature. We have learnt from our work during the past few years that there is no one model that fits each situation. All initiatives need to be designed to be socially and culturally appropriate to local contexts and practices.

Vision and action

Over the few past years, different training approaches have been implemented with varying objectives and results. Workshop themes have include, facilitation concepts and methodologies, thematic issues like traditional medicine, the concept of eco-health, and cultural reflection. Many individuals have participated in these workshops since 2005; they are mainly members of communities, and community workers from partner groups.

Working together with like-minded partners and facilitators, PCD strives to foster a more holistic view of rural and urban inter-connectedness, encouraging motivated groups and individuals to network and act as catalysts for change in areas such as consumption , education and choices for more sustainable living in general. A novel action- and reflection- oriented internship programme has been underway since 2004 to nurture a new generation of youth who have passion, knowledge and commitment on issues concerning rural development in China. Initial experiences and reflection on these activities will contribute to the development of a training curriculum for community facilitators. More systematic follow-up for coaching community facilitators is needed. More rigorous approaches need to be explored to enhance the ability of facilitators to envision development solutions from socio-cultural and ecological perspectives.