Community-centred people practices – What it means and what it can do

Anita (not her real name), like many other girls from her low-income community in Mumbai, had dropped out of school at the end of her 10th standard. At that time, Chehak, a city-based NGO working on disability and community based education, had a program called Umang. Here, girls who had completed their matriculation were offered basic skills in English speaking and computer operations, etc.

Anita, ended up enrolling in Umang. Around this time, she started out as a volunteer in an inclusive pre-school, which Chehak was running. Seeing her interest in the space of inclusion and disability, the NGO sent her for a CDA (child development aid) training, which is a certificate course, in which she did well.

Then the organization got her connected to the Helen Keller Institute. They offered her a scholarship for doing a diploma program for special educators. Chehak nominated her, and she went for that diploma course. While she was studying, the organization supported her with a small stipend, which was necessary given her socio-economic background. Anita completed her course. She now works as one of Chehak’s senior special educators. She has been working with the organization for more than eight years now.

According to Neha Madhiwalla from Chehak, “Anita’s journey is very typical. The girls from our school get involved in volunteering. We put them through training and then they come back and work with us. Not all our staff from the community have gone and done a full-fledged diploma. However, most of them have the potential to do so. It is just a matter of us being able to find the resources and to free them from their work.”

From community-based education to community-centred people practices: the story of Chehak Trust

Chehak Trust is a community-based nonprofit that works in Mumbai. The school that Neha refers to is a non-formal school started in 2000, in Jari Mari, to address the learning needs of girls who had dropped out of school because of poverty, lack of adequate schooling in the neighbourhood, and social norms. Thus, community-based alternatives were perhaps the only way out to address the educational needs of the girls who had dropped out.

Chehak’s non-formal school initially offered classes for four hours per day, with 20 outof-school adolescent girls and one teacher. This grew into the Sahyog School. It offers elementary and secondary education through the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) as well as Sahyog Jhula, a life skills program. The school translates into practice Chehak’s Trust’s vision that sees women and children realizing their potential and positive changes in their communities as concomitant, synergistic processes.

The second Sahyog School was set up in 2002 in a slum rehabilitation project at Dindoshi, Goregaon East. This was a natural expansion, as many families of the girls who were attending the school at Jari Mari were relocated to this area after their homes were demolished by the authorities.

In the same year that the second Sahyog School was established, Sahyog Sangharsh, a centre for children with disabilities was started in Jari Mari. The story of how this centre was started, helps us connect the dots of community connect in interventions, and community-centredness in people practices.

When the first Sahyog School was started in Jari Mari, Chehak was doing surveys in the community to inform their work. A pair of girls who was doing the survey came back with information about three sisters who were hearing impaired.

Thus, becoming alert to the issue of disability in the community, Chehak undertook a special survey just to identify children with disabilities. They used the standard, basic tool developed by World Health Organization (WHO). The girls from the school worked as volunteers, and helped identify 90 children with disabilities in the community.

That is how the Sahyog Sangharsh Centre for disabled children was started. Then Chehak tried to consolidate this into a program. National Institute of the Mentally Handicapped (NIMH) initially supported this work by taking Sangharsh up as a field project and by placing two of their interns supervised by a faculty.

However, it was not possible to support the initial cohort of 20 students at the Sangharsh center with only two interns. That’s when Chehak started offering scholarships to some of the girls in the Sahyog school, who started helping out for two hours, twice a week. They were getting around ₹200-500 per month, which was enough for their families to let them be at school and not put them to work.

So, this is how the first cohort of girls from the school started assisting in the Sangharsh Sahyog Centre. Each girl would be assigned two children. The girls formed a very strong bond. For those two children, this girl would become almost like a sibling. The girls would also do a lot of outreach work. They would talk to the parents, talk to the family, and bring the child to the school if the child did not turn up, and so on.

As Chehak expanded its community services, its work in the space of disability also started getting strengthened with the involvement of new groups of people. When the CSO started consciously developing its connect with the mothers of the children who were enrolled in Sahyog School, it realized that there were social restrictions on women’s movements.

So, it introduced programs that attended to their needs, and began with vocational training classes from 2017 onward. When the women came in, many of them were also found to be mothers of the children with disabilities enrolled at the CSO’s centre.

As Chehak started engaging with these women, they also began getting interested in the CSO’s disability and library programs. The library program is an initiative that came from the team, from the young girls themselves. They felt that this was a need in their community and that is how the library program began in 2015 as a pilot.

As Ruvina from the team says, “Because of our community engagement, all our programs are interconnected with each other. All our team members working in different programs are aware about what is happening in each other’s program. They are involved, and they are participating. One of the strengths of our team is definitely that most of them are from the community. This has helped us build a relationship of trust with the community. “The team members, who are from the community, are now working in a more professional setup. They are also enrolling in professional courses, as they feel the need to have some theoretical background.”

This brings us back to Anita’s story. By now, it should be clear that her trajectory is not unique. Of the eleven of Chehak’s team members, eight are from the community itself. Additionally, the organization has around 30 volunteers who have been with it for a longer time and come in on a regular basis for events and programs.

All the students at the school have also volunteered in some way or the other in Sangharsh. This is especially true of the hundred students, who are part of the scholarship program, who are from the community and have worked with the children at Sangharsh as volunteers in a structured process. The organization has also been doing work with youth members of the community and youth groups. They help Chehak out in community social events that happen during festivals.

Chehak is perhaps a textbook example how catering to the community’s needs and keeping it at the centre of the organization’s work can help in both strengthening the interventions and in making them more sustainable. This strategy also helps in making the people practices more community oriented and inclusive.

We can find evidence for this process, and the related outcomes, in the experiences of Avaniti as well. Avaniti Education and Training Foundation is a not-for-profit organization operational in the tribal belts of Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh. As an organization, it advocates for localized and child-centric education, and works with underprivileged children from communities classified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG).

Turning challenges into opportunities: learnings by Avaniti while working in a remote geography

Compared to Chehak Trust, which has been working in the field for the last couple of decades, Avaniti is a new organization that has been active on the ground for the last four years, although it was registered in 2018.

However, like Chehak, it also sees the local community, especially local, underprivileged social groups like the Kamar, at the centre of its interventions. And like the older organization, working in a very different geography, this community orientation in work is leading to a very similar orientation to how the CSO sees its emergent people practices as a young organization.

Avaniti started working in June-July 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CSO started organizing camps and activities with children in villages devoid of access to early childhood education since generations, especially those of the PVTG. The Avaniti team began interacting with the children and community members to understand the challenges, needs, local culture, practices and language.

Community members started to get involved actively, and began collaborating with the Avaniti team after building a relationship of trust. They also realized that the team members do not judge them on the basis of their food habits, culture and practices, unlike others. Rather, the Avaniti team embraces these. Thus, incrementally, the organization has become close to the community and built trust by sharing each other’s points of view and fostering collaborations at every level. Avaniti tries to take all decisions along with the community members, children and teachers, right from opening the community-owned learning centers to running them effectively.

The CSO aims to resolve the issue of access to early childhood education (ECE) for children from PVTG communities through community-owned learning centres. It supports the process of shaping the centres into spaces that promote context-based and child-led learning using a project-based pedagogy based on the psychosocial needs of each child. Avaniti also simultaneously works with the government anganwadis to improve the quality of ECE. Its strategy involves the development of perspectives and pedagogical processes in ECE, through capacity building of anganwadi teachers, existing functionaries, and associated stakeholders.

To be able to do this work, the Avaniti team realized early enough that it is important for community members to be involved. Toward this, it has evolved the role of a community leader. The goal is to capacitate community members to emerge as leaders of their local communities, beyond the confines of Avaniti’s own programmatic interventions.

Avaniti’s community leaders are working in two different kinds of roles in the CSO’s programs. One set of community leaders manage Avaniti’s learning centres for children from the the PVTG. These centres are located in villages that do not have anganwadis. Another set of community leaders are working with the government anganwadis.

They support the teachers to develop the classroom environment and contextualize early learning, through changes in their perspectives and practices.

Thus, there are four community leaders who are looking after learning centres in four different villages. Of these, three leaders are from the Kamar community, which are a PVTG, and the fourth belongs to an OBC social group. There are two other community leaders who work with the government anganwadis, one of whom is from a Scheduled Tribe (Gond) community, and the other is from an OBC background.

Krishna from Avaniti feels that “The four community leaders who work with the community-owned learning centres have more understanding about the community, the nearby forests, and nature, which help in effective engagements with the children.

The people who come with more educational background and exposure are a little less open to unlearning in the beginning. However, the organizational culture at Avaniti helps them understand the significance of this process. We have found that people with less exposure and coming from vulnerable communities are more empathetic toward children. They are also willing to learn new things and are more flexible.”

The Avaniti team initially found it challenging to get educationally qualified candidates in their remote field location in Dhamtari district in central India. The community they work with has a 92-93% dropout rate at the primary level itself. As a team, Avaniti chose to relax criteria such as educational qualifications, etc., and insisted on taking on community leaders from the intervention villages themselves, or from a locality close by. Thus, from the very beginning, the CSO has had diversity and inclusion as a key part of its recruitment process, as it sees collaboration as a key component of its mission, starting with giving preference to women and candidates coming from the weaker sections of the community.

Team members, especially community leaders, who have joined from the local area have themselves faced the same set of issues – lack of pre-schools in the villages, the distance between the habitations and schools, poor quality of education, etc., – which the children are facing now. They speak the local languages and have a better understanding about cultural practices in the villages. All these have helped them connect better with the children and contribute to their learning processes meaningfully.

The Avaniti team is now drafting its people’s policy on paper. They have been documenting their practices and having discussions with the core team and the Board members about documenting, formalizing and enhancing their people practices through this process. Central to this has been the community’s role.

Given the background from which most team members from the local community come from, building a certain flexibility into the intervention process has been a key part of how Avaniti sees both its work in the community and its own people practices. This is an important part of translating the organization’s vision of respecting voices of every individual into practice.

A good example of this is how Avaniti has managed to capture processes from the centres and classrooms it intervenes in. The initial program design envisaged the community leaders creating a short report summary on the activities undertaken with the children on a particular day. This was supposed to be done on a digital, appbased platform. However, when the team members found this difficult, they were encouraged just to write the report on paper, take a snapshot of the relevant page of the notebook and send it across.

The founding team of Avaniti has been trying to ensure that community members who work at the CSO also become aware about social values, constitutional rights, and positively change their perspective and practices. It sees this as a critical part of its organizational mandate of engaging with the local community. In team meetings, the community’s challenges and the need of working on these challenges with dedication is emphasized. For the community leaders, to feel a true sense of attunement with their role, they must not look at their work as only a part of some organizational task that they are doing, but as a way of serving their community as well.

As Krishna shares, “There are some signs that this has started happening. There are instances where the community leader has not opened their centre for two days and come and told us that they could not do so because someone in their neighbourhood had died. Since we don’t visit the centres every day and some villages don’t have proper mobile networks, they have had the honesty and ownership to share it with us.”

As a young organization, Avaniti has got many things right with respect to its people practices. However, the team sees some areas where it feels that it needs to work a lot harder at. According to Krishna, “We should have explored local networks, especially existing groups of youth and working professionals, who probably would have helped us get people on board for some roles. We also need to encourage a volunteering process and build connections at the local level with colleges and universities.”

The community orientation of work and the concomitant community-centredness of people practices in both Avaniti and Chehak seem deeply embedded, despite the different ages and geographies of the organizations.

Building communities for serving communities: the case of Apni Shala

Apni Shala is a 11-year-old social impact organization that works at the intersection of education and mental health to build social and emotional competencies among individuals. It also tries to increase access to Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) for the larger community. Its initiatives target students in educational institutions, with a focus on the public education system. The primary community it works with, government school students, their families and teachers, often come from systemically marginalized backgrounds. Apni Shala works with these communities with the understanding that access to opportunities for nurturing psychosocial well-being is critical for young people’s development, particularly for children coming from low-income homes.

In around 2015-16, a year or so after the organization was started, Apni Shala started to actively and openly discuss issues related to community, participation, representation and equity. The CSO began to look at diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as their lenses for much of the work. Now, almost 65-70% of its team comes from backgrounds similar to that of the students the organization works with. So, for example, in an Apni Shala school, one of the helper didis is a parent too. Similarly, many of the youth project alumni (a youth SEL program the CSO used to run earlier) have now joined the organization as communications executives, teachers and SEL facilitators.

To an extent, this has happened by design, by targeting the application procedure, and by setting up the recruitment system to support people from diverse backgrounds go through the process with ease. This has also involved fostering a culture of belonging at the organization. “Diversity Shala,” an internal training program for all staff members, has been an important part of this process. When new team members join in, they are invited to engage with themes such as gender, sexuality, class, caste, religion and disability.

One way in which the principle of equity is sought to be applied in the organization is by instituting a 1:5 ratio of salary difference between the lowest and the highest salaries at any point of time. The organization has also been actively pursuing de-credentialization by giving more importance to experience, demonstrable skills and motivation for the work, rather than degrees, to fill many of the roles. Therefore, a significant part of the organization’s work also involves supporting the team members hired from the community to develop skills that were not made available to them in their past learning journeys. Apni Shala also gives salience to the strengths and skills emerging from their lived experiences, also called self-knowledge or lived expertise, in designing organizational roles. Likewise, there are mindsets and skills that some folks, being from backgrounds and contexts of economic and social privilege, may not have, and must learn to be able to serve the communities that the CSO works with.

When Apni Shala begins a new school year, an all-staff orientation process marks the starting point. Throughout the year, apart from departmental training programs that people go through, there are individualized training opportunities as well. Another practice of the CSO that is relevant to the discussion here is called the “Apni Shala Supervision Framework.”

This framework is designed with three different areas in mind. One is restoration, which is about dealing with feelings emerging at work. The second one is more formal and relates to meeting developmental needs. The third area is normative supervision, where the supervisor works with team members to help them achieve their goals.

Apni Shala also follows some additional practices to both build community and respond to the community’s needs. These include a protocol called serial testimony during meetings. It means that everyone in the room, whether a helper, or the CEO, or a leader, or a teacher, get their chance and time, to share what they think about the topic under discussion.

As an organization, Apni Shala sees this openness to learning as an iterative process. It is becoming aware that organizational aspirations got coded in value definitions. As Rohit from the team shares, “When we started thinking about leadership transition, we reached out to Suchetha, CEO of Dream a Dream, who is also an organization development mentor. We told her that we don’t have a second-line leadership.”

She asked us, ‘Why do you think you don’t have a second-line of leadership?” Then she said, ‘You have people who have stayed with you for five, six years and you’re saying you don’t have a second-line leadership, which means that something is not right within the system. It’s not a problem of you not having second-line leadership. It’s something else.”

“And then we reflected and arrived at a place, where we realized that the values that we have coded for ourselves, are the problem. We had borrowed the value of “excellence” from the larger ecosystem. It was exclusionary for a large part of our team. Our team members, especially those from community backgrounds similar to our students, were doing really good work. However, this capitalistic idea of excellence was very central in many of the leaders’ minds. For team members who are from the community, it didn’t make sense. Because we know that community work is nuanced and slow.

“So, our team members were questioning the leaders’ idea of excellence, and we were perhaps not listening in. And then when Suchetha posed this question, we were led to realize that the problem was with our values and not in the absence of a secondline leadership. So, to redefine our values we started a process. It took almost eight months. We used a lot of theatre and the arts, to come up with what we really aspire for, what we want to be on a day-to-day basis.

Our central values got redefined as compassion, equity and trust. These are the three values that we want and aspire to live by on a day-to-day basis.” These values, coming out of a community-oriented, deliberative process, are now driving the strategic plan of the organization. Apni Shala is using the values as the grounding for thinking about its strategic planning. And this process has involved not only the organizational leadership, but the whole organization, a large part of whose members come from the community itself.

Conclusions

As must be evident from the experiences of the three organizations shared above, organizational and operational processes on one hand, and people’s processes on the other, are interrelated. Consciously thinking about this and making the community a part of building interlinkages between the two can lead to many interesting and useful results.

Community involvement that results in adequate representation of community members in the staff can go a long way in meeting the problem of staffing the frontline. Often, it is difficult to get professionals to work in community-based settings. Nurturing talent within the community in these contexts is important.

This process creates a very strong and solid base for work, and brings a very different texture and flavor to programs. This is because community members bring in their own sensibilities, histories and experiences. Large organizations who can put aside some funds for scholarships to fund mentorship programs should do so, as in the process, may be in a few years down the line, they would be able to create professionals who are from the community itself.

It is also important to work with community based institutions and build strong relationships with these. These could be self help groups, banks, or local clubs or women’s groups. These are part of the social network and social support system of the children and their families that the CSOs work with. Working with these social institutions helps in building community connect and creates support systems and an environment of inclusion.