Utilizing Community Strength

Through three regions in Liberia, the Community Integrated Development and Need-Based Project (CIDNEP) reached 15,000 people in seven communities. Adolphus Dupley (Class of 2015), Associate Director with Liberia's Department of Community Services, began CIDNEP after learning the principles of SEED-SCALE.

The influential idea for him was building on local successes and understanding community capacity. The result increased community access to essential services - education, water, sanitation, health, and agriculture - in Liberia's most densely populated regions. "We created a partnership between all parties so needs are met." says Dupley.

Prior to enrolling in the Graduate School, Dupley ran the predecessor project to CIDNEP. It used a one-size-fits-all approach. "There was no particular attention being paid to community capacity, knowledge, and involvement," he remarks.

The Community Integrated Development and Needs-Based Project reached more people in its first year than its predecessor ever did. More than half are women. "We have made interventions in areas of gender where for the first time in some of these communities women are now playing major leadership roles," notes Dupley. In addition to gender equity, the project addresses underground water pollution, forest resource management, and peacebuilding.

Future Generations Researches and Promotes Social Participation in Primary Healthcare Services

The Shared Administration Program in Peru is one of the successful community change experiences that the Future Generations SEED-SCALE methodology is based on. Co-founder Dr. Carl E. Taylor provided orientation to Peru in 1994 at the request of their Minister of Health to design a new program for primary healthcare with community participation. SEED-SCALE was then in the process of development, so the Peru program was designed on the basis of SEED-SCALE principles, while also soon becoming evidence for further development of the methodology.

Meeting of members of CLAS Las Moras, the original pilot site.

 Peru is now one of the few countries with a governmental health program that features legalized, regulated, and institutionalized community participation. A 1994 government decree gave community entities collaborative responsibility and decision-making power over the management of public resources to administer primary healthcare services. Called CLAS Associations (Local Health Administration Committees), these private non-profit entities work under contract with the state, and the medical chief of a primary care facility is executive director as the public sector counterpart. The three-way partnership involves government, health services, and community.

How does social participation reflect SEED-SCALE through CLAS? When local people identify their needs instead of only central planners, it improves equity and efficiency of public spending. The watchdog role of citizens overseeing use of public resources ensures transparency and reduces misuse of funds. Citizens can exert social control when they pressure health providers to come to work on time and treat patients well, and can make decisions on purchases (equipment, maintenance, extra staff) to ensure better quality of care. Social participation makes local health and development programs more sustainable. The CLAS program scaled-up rapidly to cover 32% of all 2,700 primary healthcare facilities nationwide because of word-of-mouth from satisfied communities. Future Generations was instrumental in development of a law on CLAS approved in 2007 by the Peruvian Congress that enhanced the SCALE-Cubed policy environment.

Future Generations has played a key role over the years in conducting CLAS program research and evaluation, preparing papers for dissemination and advocacy, and providing technical support on the CLAS program. Documents on the CLAS program in Peru are available through Future Generations University's publications library.

Lifelong Learning

"You stop learning, you start dying," insists Ruben Puentes, Professor and Director of Partnerships at Future Generations Graduate School. His career reflects his desire to expand - as a soil scientist for a government agency, a teacher for a U.S. university, the leader of a network of researchers in transnational migration, Associate Vice President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and a part-time potato grower on his farm in Uruguay. For Puentes, life is always a classroom.

Puentes (center) listening to a discussion between a farmer and a local expert in Manaus, Brazil.

Puentes' task at the Graduate School is to strengthen the Master's Degree in Applied Community Change curriculum along with student teaching and advising. "This is a unique opportunity to continue learning, not only from faculty colleagues but from students themselves."

Puentes' students appreciate his global experience that links community development, natural resources management, and agriculture. Most are practitioners themselves with diverse experiences, and their questions force Puentes to continue learning.

"Education is in the learning, not the teaching," Puentes says. "Future Generations Graduate School is the place to be for those with a passion for learning; it is difficult to find a better place either to start or continue a lifelong learning journey."

Voices of Future Generations: Puddles

At Future Generations, we often flip the role of teacher and student. Everyone has something they can teach someone else and everyone has something they can learn from someone else. This is the inherent truth in learning communities.

This week's episode of Voices embodies just that. A father attempts to teach his daughter a lesson and ends up learning one instead.

Voices of Future Generations: Girls from Halifax

Racism. Stereotypes. Job security. These have been contemporary issues in Britain surrounding the influx of refugees and the Brexit vote. They are contemporary issues, but not new issues. In this week's Voices track, girls from Halifax, England talk candidly about these issues in their own community.

360 Degree Feedback

Understanding oneself and making productive personal changes are difficult but rewarding tasks. Future Generations Assistant Professor Dr. Jesse Pappas, along with a team of colleagues, created the Personality Pad to facilitate these tasks. 

"The Personality Pad's goal is to assist with self-insight and self-development," says Pappas. "The tech platform it uses will drive a peer-reviewed process among faculty and will eventually be used among students." The National Science Foundation has been funding Dr. Pappas' work on the Personality Pad since 2011. In that time, thousands of individuals worldwide have used it to gain self-insight and set self-development goals. 

Personality Pad uses a system of 360 degree feedback. "Essentially, 360 degree feedback provides insight about how individuals perceive themselves compared to how they are perceived by the people around them," reads the project's website, www.personalitypad.org.

Dr. Pappas and his team's goal is to adapt this well-established professional tool for personal use. Findings suggest that a majority of individuals have a greater understanding of their personality after implementing 360 degree feedback. In many cases, this leads to actionable plans to implement personal development. Pappas is also working to adapt the technology to the specific needs of Future Generations Graduate School. "One unique but challenging aspect of the Future Generations cohort module is an extremely diverse group of students, in terms of culture, previous academic training, and learning styles. The Personality Pad could go a long way in improving the teaching effectiveness of our faculty."

Advocating for Rural Communities

From early in her career, Shannon Elizabeth Bell (Class of 2005) knew that her research must benefit the people she was studying. Bell recently published Fighting King Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in Central Appalachia (MIT Press, 2016). Along with her previous book, the award-winning Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2013), Fighting King Coal brings to light the myriad environmental injustices taking place in the coalfields of Appalachia.

Bell is currently an associate professor at the University of Kentucky. Her books and career build from her Future Generations practicum. Titled West Virginia Photovoice, her practicum bridged activism and the academy through in-depth interviews, participant observation, geospatial viewshed analysis, and document analysis.

One important insight from her graduate work with Future Generations was building from successes. She led fifty-four women in five coal mining communities through an eight month process of "telling the story" of their communities. These stories included the strengths, beauty, and challenges, as well as the participants' ideas for change. Many ideas became realities thanks to the visibility that Photovoice provided. Roads were repaired, municipal waterlines were built, and a community park and pool were reopened. The project increased participants' sense of efficacy and empowerment.

To learn more about Shannon Bell's West Virginia Photovoice project, visit www.wvphotovoice.org.