Two important principles in community work

1) Work in groups

The facilitator who is alone, and who goes to the community individually, may be successful however, let’s do not forget what promote what we live. We are going to train people to be together while we are alone. People learn from our behavior, and thus, I recommend that we have to be together too. It means that instead of one facilitator, be a team of facilitators who work together. This is our very precious experience when we were involved in poverty reduction project of the State Welfare Organization in Iran years ago. The facilitating bodies were the social work clinics in provinces. The clinics were run based on an individually managed entity. Therefore, they were somehow promoting individual management and work among communities. Just imagine: lonely facilitator talks about working together. It does not work. Even in our dialogues with some of the managers of the clinics, we heard they said: “there is not a culture of group activities in Iran, how you are trying to promote community work”. This is important to add that there should be a belief in community work too. Not only facilitators have to work in a team, they have to believe in team work. They must talk about their real experiences of success.

2) Do not be frustrated even if people are frustrated

In certain cases of community work (this is about Boompajuhan activities in communities), we found that people were not interested to continue: they are tired or they have not been successful in gaining the attention of others to their precious work or they could not move forward. In certain instances, you might hear that we could not continue since it has been useless. The facilitators have to be patient, and try to have meetings (or processes) with people to find solutions together. This is a problem like many other problems of the village that might have been resolved. This could have a solution too. Then encourage your local group to have a meeting. The members of the local group could talk about that. A structured dialogue could help them to understand the causes of the situation. Be patient and do not become frustrated.