The Future of Community Development: Organizing?

For decades, the professions of community development and community organizing have been seen as strictly separate endeavors. Like two brothers jostling for the love and affection of their parents, these fields have bickered over who helps more people and who is more effective. But I dare to ask, “what if we were to combine the two?”

Community organizing carved its niche as the courageous fighter of traditional “struggle” issues by taking on such grappling issues as civil rights, labor rights, and women rights. Community organizing has earned the reputation as the more combative and confrontational of the two brothers versus the rather conciliatory tone of community development. From time to time, it has belittled its brother as being too soft to be effective and as a glory hound that’s unwilling to rock the boat.

Community development bathes in the limelight that its brother rarely receives. Its well known work covers health, poverty, education, amongst other issues through well known organizations such as the Red Cross, United Nations, and USAID. It paints its brother as being too irrational and compulsive to make any substantive long lasting change especially in nations with short leashes on political freedoms.

Like any two brothers whose relationship devolved to perpetual spats and spurts, they fail to see the vast potential of combining their collective and complementary strengths. It is true that community development generally lacks the hard nose that’s sometimes needed to redistribute power more equitably. It’s also true that community organizing lacks the diplomatic finesse that’s sometimes needed to successfully move forward in weak democratic states. This begs the inevitable question, what if the best of community organizing were combined with the best of community development?

This is what my work is all about. Trained in Saul Alinsky style community organizing, I have the expertise to apply organizing just about anywhere. However, I needed to adapt this skill set to fit the unique rigors of community development. For months I tried to develop a model that would capture just the right blend of organizing and development so that it could catapult my community (and potentially my field) to new heights.

My search for the Holy Grail proved to be long and arduous, but nothing worthwhile comes easily. I began with only a prayer and vague vision powerful enough to will me through the difficulties of the early months. Hot and sweaty days laboring in the fields with farmers, logging several kilometers on my bicycle riding between villages everyday, and struggling to understand my surroundings through limited language ability all in the hope of one day finding a working model that would lift the lives of the humble people I live with.

After the first few months, such a model began to take shape as leaders began to complain of the lack of a structure that would enable more villagers to participate in village development. It seemed that the lion’s share of this responsibility was on the shoulders of village leaders, leading to burn out among many.

These conversations got me thinking: Is it possible to develop such a structure that would enable more villagers to actively participate in development? The long term implications of such a group are profound: less dependence upon government and NGOs, more empowerment of the local villager, a greater sense of communal responsibility in all areas of life, ect. As I sat down and hashed this out with some local buddies, it became clear that the objective would be to make the village more like a family. Every villager should have a defined role in helping to build up the village, just like every member of a family plays a role in the betterment of the family. Hence, the name of the group should be One Village One Family since the goal is to have one village act more like one family.

This concept also seemed to fit conveniently within the framework of the King’s vision for his nation. He has stressed building up a self sufficient economy as well as greater local control within Thailand’s democracy. This model could help in potentially achieving both objectives. The long term implications of this model tantalized my imagination, but we had to build it first.

Now my vague vision seemed a bit clearer, but I still needed to work out the details. How would such a group look like? This burning question would become my preoccupation for the next several weeks. I asked friends involved in community organizing back home, but they did not understand the operational context of Thailand. I felt alone in this pursuit and voiced my frustrations to God deep in the forest (didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy). After the tears of tribulation stopped flowing, I realized that I looked everywhere except one major resource: the internet.

I hastily returned to the SAO and strapped into an open desktop. Yahoo was the destination and after a couple of key words, sure enough, everything I needed to know was just a click away. Now I was able to draft an outline of the group as well as write a twelve page training manual (I used a training manual I wrote in college as a guide). Fortunately, a friend of mine in the church decided to translate my materials for an affordable fee.

The structure of the group seemed simple. Have a steering team of between 7-9 villagers overseeing several sub-project teams of between 3-5 villagers. The villagers would identify, develop, and implement these projects themselves. This would create an apparatus that lessens the load on the elected village leaders and increases villager engagement and project completion efficiency. In the bigger picture, this would be one great step forward towards Thailand fulfilling the promise of higher local participation in its democracy. After all, a truly vibrant democracy has citizens who are engaged on a daily basis, not simply at the voter’s box. I now assumed we were ready, but I didn’t foresee the practical problems that lay ahead in actually implementing it.

I held meetings with every village chief and surveyed the villages in my area in order to get it started. The village chiefs and villagers said that they loved the idea, but that proved to be only lip service. They had real concerns about the project such as funding and, even bigger, a fear of failure. No one wanted to try a new model because they didn’t want to fail. This led to me creating a sister project for OneVillage One Family at the school called Project Hope. Project Hope had the same structure as OVOF, but the goal was to increase student participation in the school and village while providing real leadership experiences and opportunities, not just token leadership games where there’s nothing at stake.

This finally began a series of successful events for our work. Project Hope flowed together seamlessly. We had both a senior team (ages 16-18) and junior team (ages 13-15) within the group. The junior group just stayed within the confines of the school and learned basic development tools such as surveying and building relationships with leaders. The senior group had the responsibility of working with villages and the SAO to develop and implement real projects.

The senior team held their training first, and at the training were 4 girls and 2 boys (the 2 boys later dropped out and were replaced by another girl). They then conducted the training of the junior team with little guidance from me. Once the senior team learned the basic organizing concepts they were ready to act.

The first issue they wanted to address was providing clothing for the poorer hill tribe village families. At first, my girls were timid and didn’t believe that they could do it. We arranged a meeting with the balat of the SAO to discuss possibilities of implementing this project. My girls were fearful because this was the first time they had a meeting on a level playing field with a high ranking SAO officer. To my understanding, a group of teenage girls approaching SAO leaders about collaborating on a project rarely, if ever, happens in Thailand. I gave my girls a little pep talk and told them there is power in numbers, so they shouldn’t be afraid.

The meeting went well. The balat, a little taken back by my girls’ requests, agreed to work with them in completing the project. The next step involved my girls organizing a week long donation rally, which netted well over 800 articles of clothing stuffed into 25 boxes and garbage bags. It was a stunning display of community generosity and sheer organizing talent by my girls to raise so much from students and villagers considering the modest economic means of my area. This clothing drive surprised the teachers and administrative staff of the school because this was the first time they saw their students achieve such a feat without direct teacher supervision and direction.

The school truck drove my girls and the clothing donations to the hill tribes, about a 30 km and 45 minute trek. My girls were excited since this was the first time they traveled to the hill tribes. Fellow students wished them well on their journey and teachers proudly stood by to witness the accomplishment. Upon arriving at the hill tribe villages, the impact of this project struck them as they saw firsthand the dilapidated housing and impoverished families. The village chief warmly welcomed us and the village treated us to a special lunch. The chief and local people were amazed at the large amount of clothing my girls were giving them. The village chief even choked up a bit as he continually repeated, “dee mak, dee mak mak”.

Once this project was completed, my girls had just enough time to turn their attention to OVOF before the close of the semester. Since villagers wanted their fears eased and a model to follow, we decided to hold a village training where my girls taught the basic principles of the organizing model as well as showed them that such a model could be very successful. As I observed the training, the wider impact of this work dawned on me: a group of five 17 year old girls is training villagers in their 40s and 50s as well as a couple of SAO representatives how to do development. It was literally the young leading the old. For this moment, the rigid Thai social hierarchy was flipped upside down. I caught myself smirking at this very thought.

I later treated my girls to a day at Big C on me. We went shopping, ate at KFC, and watched a Thai movie together. For the first time in my life I felt like a proud parent (I don’t have kids). The thing is, I truly do love my girls and I sincerely want them to be more successful than me. I genuinely enjoy their company and find myself deeply invested in their lives. Over school vacation I will teach my girls English four times a week and I purchased them books on scholarships and college entrance exam preparations. A scary thought is that my girls are just beginning to scratch the surface of their potential, and an even scarier thought is that they now are realizing the vast potential within them. That is priceless.

My village team held a meeting with the villagers to announce that we were launching One Village One Family in the village. They discussed amongst each other what our first project should be and we concluded that launching a fertilizer group would be it. The villagers’ top concern is improving the village economy, so starting off with a group that would provide some jobs and money to families would be a great way to build initial credibility within the village.

About a week later, the pastor of my church approached me about helping me to replicate this model throughout the province. My church is part of a national network of churches and the headquarters is in Bangkok. My local pastor informed me that the head pastor in Bangkok started a social and community development initiative where he wants every church in Thailand to take an active role in helping the community. My local pastor continued by saying that my projects appealed to him because it is grassroots based and it doesn’t call for a budget in order to do it. Apparently, Thailand doesn’t yet have a model similar to this so he is excited by the possibility of helping to replicate this project.

There are 13 districts in my province. We have churches and relationships in all 13 districts. My local pastor wants to first help me finish setting up the model before implementing it in the other 12 districts. He met with both my school and village teams and he currently comes up once a week and helps out.

What started off as a vague vision of welding the best of community development and organizing has transpired into a compelling tale of girl power as a group of teenage girls empowered and, in some regards, revolutionized their entire community. This model has unlocked the promise in everyday students and villagers just by giving them what America is all about: opportunity. The intestinal fortitude of organizing exemplified by the courage of my girls standing shoulder to shoulder with the most powerful people in the area combined with the conciliatory nature of development proves to be a potent mix going a long way towards community empowerment. I now openly wonder what Thailand would be like if OVOF and Project Hope existed in every village and every school throughout the country. That for now remains an open question, but one thing is for sure: wherever this model goes in the future, Thailand, and the greater world, will be thanking five little 17 year old female pioneers who got it all started.