September 2024 Practitioner Gathering Harvest - CDLI
On Wednesday September 11th CDLI hosted the ninth gathering for community development practitioners of 2024!
We had four discussion topics for practitioners to choose from and practitioners chose to engage in three of them . See our shared harvest here or in the slides below. If you have a topic in mind that you would like to discuss with other community development practitioners please let us know and we will include it in a future COP date that works for you.
In the share back participants identified key take away/points of reflection that came from the conversations.
1) When doing CD work that has built community trust, we often hear of structural or other issues that aren’t directly related to the initiative we are working on. How can we lift that information up?
Sometimes there are internal channels that we can feed things up to - being aware of them is important.
City Councilors have avenues of advocacy for residents that professionals may not have access to and it can be important for people to learn about them in a supportive way.
Even with these mechanisms in place, structures like capitalism make us consumers of community and there are many structural barriers in place for residents/citizens.
2) Engaging community members in the art of respectful debate.
Deep listening and active listening are different.
Use tools to set norms.
Model listening with validation of perspectives that you don’t necessarily agree with.
3) What role does data and research have in your practice to further your community development mission?
There is a difference sometimes in the research that is mandated by the funder and the research that is needed in the community.
A research action team can be established that has the ability to inform the decisions around research - comprised of community members and organizational staff/research/evaluation staff.
Different models work in different groups and communities in different ways. *This slide is full of rich notes on different methods and frameworks - take a look!