What is the community and what are community-led approaches?
By Alessandra Podestà (Innovation Learning Manager, Start Network) and Seema Kapoor (Innovation Manager, Elrha)
Why do we want to explore what it means to be community-led?
Our programme is called the Community-led Innovation Partnership (CLIP). But what do each of those words really mean? During the early months of our partnership, it dawned on us that we all had different perspectives and ideas of what each of these concepts mean and how we apply it to our work.
So, we decided we should start by interrogating each of these terms — “community-led,” “innovation” and “partnership” — and, if necessary, reimagine these concepts to fit a new way of working. In this blog, we begin to interrogate what it means to be a community and community-led.
What is a community and who defines it?
Before we can try to understand what it means to be community-led, we must first explore what a community is. There are competing definitions of community often used in sociology and other fields. What they all have in common is they see “community” as a group of people living in the same place, interacting with each other and having particular characteristics and interests in common (Oxford Dictionary). It is a term that can be qualified according to the focus of an initiative, and for our community-led innovation partnership this specifically relates to groups of people who experience risks of humanitarian crises in a defined context.
Together, we are working with organisations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines who are at the frontline of humanitarian response, working and supporting specific communities to respond to crises. What matters most to us is how our partners identify and frame their ideas of “community” with the communities themselves. Any definition of community is shaped by the relationship and dynamics that emerge from the community and this can and will vary greatly.
In preliminary workshop discussions with our partners, we asked how we could frame the concept of community according to their perspective and work, so that we could come to a better understanding of what it means for our partnership.
Broadly, they proposed that “community” could refer to a group of people who actively participate and share a common vision together for their lives. Working with a community may mean working with people who are part of a community structure, such as a community-based organisation and community leaders, or engaging with individuals who are outside of any specific organisational structure. Either way, to be representative of a community their lives should be embedded within the group of people for whom we intend to achieve impact through the partnership. They experience the same risks, the same everyday challenges, the same access to resources etc. This means that their lived experience is largely shared by the collective group of people within the community we seek to reach.
What does it mean to be community led?
We believe becoming community led is not a linear process or even an end goal, but rather an ongoing practice of community-defined principles and values (Carlman, 2020).
Below, we suggest a number of core principles for a community-led approach, based on our discussions with partners. They are not fixed or exhaustive, but rather a starting point to work with our partners to build and evolve based on their needs and perspectives.
Seek and promote ownership and leadership from the community. Centre all activities, from problem definition to solution design and testing, on the communities.
Prioritise local expertise, knowledge, and community-defined values.
Advocate for inclusivity. Explore power dynamics within the community to ensure equitable engagement with different groups. Everyone brings value and every voice should be heard.
Cultivate relationships and trust. Build equitable relationships with communities, seeking buy-in and support from leadership and community structures.
Communicate transparently and effectively with communities. Create and utilise clear and effective communication channels with communities to ensure equitable access to information.
Reimagine and shift roles, so we are consciously taking on a supportive role and putting communities at the centre of the work, as leaders.
Document and use locally-generated evidence. Learn with and from communities to improve practice. Document and share these learnings.
Deploy a flexible approach that allows adequate time, resources, and regular space for reflection and feedback from the community.
Our community-led innovation partnership has a foundational belief that leadership and ownership in humanitarian innovation directly and positively affects its results and sustainability. We posit that the principle of a community-led approach is an important intent and that to be “community-led” we must apply it “to the greatest degree possible.” However, we acknowledge this may look and function differently depending on the limitations of the context, the conditions of the programme funds and the timeframe in which the programme is operational.
What does this mean in practice?
To practice being community-led, we strive to prioritise the community’s principles in our everyday decisions, actions, and communications. Community-led approaches are not just service models, but ways of thinking, underpinned by core principles and mindset. These are not fixed either but evolve and adapt according to the situation and context.
Being community-led means challenging our mindset every day to make sure all aspects of our work are led with the community’s values at the forefront. There may be some obstacles to fully run community-led approaches, such as underlying community power or economic dynamics. They may be hard to overcome in a short timeframe and may preclude enabling a community-led process to work well, or donor demands for quick results and outputs.
It is therefore important to recognise that implementing all community-led principles at once may not happen. What matters is getting in the shared mindset of being community-led, starting within our organisations and partners and then applying community-led values, principles and a framework to the work to the extent possible.
We recognise that in the context of our programme each partner will target different communities and may choose different engagement strategies. However, it is critical we all work towards the highest degree of community ownership and leadership, keeping ourselves accountable to these principles.
Next steps and what do we hope to learn?
We continue to build and refine a shared understanding of how our partners define communities and frame principles they prioritise in their community-led work.
Based on their insights, we will co-develop a framework tool to help us track our community-led practice journey and keep us all accountable to our shared goal of being community-led. We will continue to learn from and with our partners and communities, so we may adapt and improve our practice over time.
