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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Community management and facilitation

In Tehran, a city council whose members are directly elected by Tehran citizens is in power. Still for a metropolitan city like Tehran, such council acts mostly at macro level. After some time, and by a decree by the Tehran city council, neighborhood councils were established. These negiborhood councils (or Shora-yari or friends of the council) are again elected by the direct votes of people in communities. Tehran has been divided into 374 communities, and each of them has one established neighborhood council.

After sometime, a new mechanism was introduced: community manager (or Modir Mahaleh). A new concept that was brought into the communities to resolve the problems with the city council (who cannot decide for every community in Tehran) and the neighborhood councils (who had only limited duties of monitoring the municipality and keeping communication with the city council). The new community manager now has come into scene, with more powers, to help the community development.

To select one capable community manager,  a new entity was established in communities in Tehran: Community Trustees' Committee (or Heyat Omanaye Mahaleh), composed of members from neighborhood council, community mosque, local active groups (CBOs) and the representative of the Municipality at sub-district level. This entity helps the community manager to better decide and act in the community. 

It seems a little bit strange that in less than 20 years we have created five new mechanisms in Tehran: City council, neighborhood councils, Community Trustees' Committee, local groups at community level, and community manager. I think such mechanisms cannot work well without the people who know how to talk, how to create a constructive dialogue, how to decide in groups, and how to cooperate with each other. Facilitation can be an effective tool for all those who intend to have results at the end, since it will assist to have communicative process at various levels. In fact, facilitators can be much useful in creating common visions and objectives at various levels from smaller groups of community-based organizations to committees and neighborhood councils.