Why NGOs need community building too
All great parenting books echo the idea:
“If you want to change your child’s behavior, you must model it. Don’t fall into the trap of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.”
Our work as NGOs on the Balkan Peninsula with displaced communities is challenging, rewarding, important and can be incredibly frustrating at times on many levels. Because of this, we might not even realize that some of our behavior can come across as negative to others. In these cases, we need to think about the message we send to those we are trying to help if we can not coordinate, communicate and collaborate effectively and efficiently among ourselves as service providers. How can we expect the diverse communities living side by side in a refugee camp to get along if we, the NGOs, are fighting, ignoring, and indirectly sabotaging each other’s efforts to help? Shouldn’t we model the behavior we are trying to promote?
We spend an enormous amount of time trying to help beneficiaries integrate, socialize and form effective supportive communities where they can lean on one another to make it through the day — work together, build tolerance for differences, adjust to new realities, be resilient and yet we neglect our own need for a safe, trusting community where we can build these same skills that benefit us all.
At the Concordia Summit in NYC this year, when asked why he has never used a negative ad to beat a political rival in an election, Governor John Hickenlooper of Colorado, shared a great analogy:
If Pepsi puts out a negative ad on Coke, Coke must retaliate with another negative ad, and then the soft drink industry looks bad and people stop buying soda. They both lose in the end. This is why they don’t do it. It’s the same in politics. If we run negative ads, people get turned off and they don’t vote.
This cause and effect can easily translate over to our context. If we, as a community of NGOs, exhibit microaggressions towards each other, we look bad to the outside world as a whole, ending up with less trust, less engagement and therefore less overall, collective impact. We are hurting ourselves and those we are trying to help by not working together in a trusting, supportive community.
Our mission has always been to break down silos between educational stakeholders to improve outcomes. We have clocked in over 500 hours of phone calls, site visits, Skype calls, face to face meeting, both in groups and one on one, to work towards building the key relationships we feel is needed to achieve this lasting structural change around the way we work together in the field. We have tried to model the behavior we want to see. It hasn’t been easy. We haven’t always succeeded. It takes a lot of time to reflect, cool off, and remember why we are teaching, helping, managing, and planning. A community that empathizes and supports you can help you be a better teacher, coordinator, director, or donor.
One concrete result of all our community outreach efforts and relationship building has been a community map of the diverse stakeholders providing non-formal educational support to displaced communities in Greece. We created this as a rough tool to encourage others to reach out and find partners, collaborators, advisors, trusted counsel, an understanding ear to act as a sounding board for new project ideas or to improve the ones already started. The purpose of our map is more than just to convey information. We want it to inspire those listed to collaborate with others on the map and create a direct channel for those outside the community looking to support externally through donations, direct resources, expertise for capacity building, etc. The first step to organizing a community is to find out who is in it, where they are located, and what they are trying to achieve. Our mapping efforts have tried to address this need and complete the first phase in a long, ongoing process of creating effective communities of practice (learning communities) among NGOs and other service providers for displaced populations on the Balkan Peninsula.
The information sources for our map consist of Refugee Info, Open Schools Athens, Athens Outreach, Campfire Innovation,V4R.info, Generation 2.0, OPOIESIS, Athens Volunteers Information and Coordination Group, Khora Center Mapping effort (hard copy), Greece Education Sector Working Group (ESWG ), and Team Up 2 Teach Field Research and Verification. Several of these mapping sources are outdated so we used them early on in our mapping effort and field verified all our data points to make sure we have the most accurate representation of the scope of work being carried out in the field at this time (Dec 2018). However, everyone in the field knows that this data will stay relevant for maybe a month before it starts to change again. We are working in a dynamic and ever-changing community of stakeholders around non-formal education support for displaced learners living in Greece. The situation is in a constant state of flux.
It should be mentioned that 90% of the work towards creating this map was spent on NGO and teacher community outreach efforts and only 10% on design. We know that there are better ways to represent this data but, with our limited resources, we decided to focus on connecting with those in the field. We deeply feel that it is these connections and outreach that will help those of us working in this context to dismantle the silo effect. Face to face communication and on the ground understanding of what a neighboring organization does will only facilitate our strength in numbers in terms of working toward our common goals. Therefore, if anyone sees value in this map and wants to help improve its design and functionality, please reach out. Or if you have a map already created that needs more data, we would love to work with you. We are looking for partners to continue what we believe is important work to help create the community we need in order to continue to model the behavior in the world we strive to create together.
