At the end of August, Neil McCullagh sat down with Ruth Allen, Mercy Corps’ Global Advisor for Community Mobilization, Governance and Partnerships, to discuss the release of Mercy Corps’ Guide to Community Mobilization Programming.  This valuable guide, grounded in over ten years of Mercy Corps’ practical experience in supporting community-led development, can be found here.

NM:  Mercy Corps has been doing this for so long.  What does this new guide give Mercy Corps practitioners or other practitioners that they did not have before?

RA:  Mercy Corps has been working on community mobilization since the mid-‘90s and formalized our approaches in the late ‘90s.  What happened at that point was the amazing adoption of this philosophy - this way of putting participation at the forefront of leadership at the community level.  There was rapid uptake by our staff and different teams implemented, expanded and created – whether by finding ways to mobilize communities during an emergency as our Georgia team did or revising tools designed for rural communities and applying them in urban Indonesia.  The new guide is the consolidation of all that creative adaptation in the field.  It draws on all the tools that have been created across the Mercy Corps world, and puts them all within easy reach.  It is also for people who aren’t doing community mobilization, but are coming to this as a new concept or are partnering with Mercy Corps and wanting to understand this methodology.  It’s an easy entry point to understand some big concepts which are rarely defined in one place.

NM:  You say it’s available for all organizations.  Is there any need or interest in keeping proprietary any of the methods or tools that Mercy Corps uses?

RA:  Not at all!  We want to get this out there for a couple reasons:  a) to better the practice of our entire field; and b) to give Mercy Corps staff the tools and resources needed to continue their work and innovate.  Mercy Corps feels like this is a methodology that we’ve really embraced.  We’ve helped move the field forward significantly, and we wanted to put something out there that celebrates that, and acknowledges it for all the people that have been doing the hard work in countries around the world.

NM:  There’s one particular diagram that I think is helpful to mobilizers and program managers.  It describes the various levels of community participation and recognizes that all communities, all people, are not starting from the same place.

RA:  Yes.  That’s right.  When asked “where do most community members start?”, our field staff in a number of different country programs said that it’s a mix, even within a given community.  So being flexible with people and going through a process where they’re able to make more decisions together, prioritize things more efficiently, take more leadership, up to the point where people don’t need an external group. They don’t need a Mercy Corps or one of our partners to facilitate that process.  They’re facilitating it themselves, and we’re there either as a safety net or in an advisory capacity.

NM:    The manual talks about training staff in several key areas, including procurement and finance.  Can you talk a bit about Mercy Corps’ approach to training and community mobilization?

RA:  I think the thing in the manual that you’re referring to is getting staff trained in a wide variety of skill sets.  There were recommendations from a number of different country offices saying “we need to have people who are agile enough to move from working with a community, to facilitating a prioritization meeting, to having a conversation with the local administrator.”  It’s also helpful for mobilization teams to be able to understand budgets and have monitoring skills, both for overall project implementation and to help community members participate in and lead these same processes.  Mobilizers are often in community leadership roles well after projects end.  So staff capacity building in all these areas is a major part of community mobilization.

NM:  Prepositioning was an interesting section, because it’s powerful when you say “we need to be clear about expectations.”  It’s the first step in the mobilization process according to the manual.

RA:  Often, people who design programs have the luxury of thinking about the best case scenario, and then you get to the actual implementation and realize circumstances may have changed - there are daily practicalities that proposals just can’t take into account.  So, getting a program team together and on the same page before engaging community members is just good practice - being reflective, thoughtful practitioners as opposed to launching into something that may or may not work in the current context. And this becomes an ongoing part of the mobilization process.  Our staff said that reassessing multiple times throughout implementation is helpful because you constantly have to re-strategize to facilitate getting people from passive mobilization to being able to implement things without the assistance of a Mercy Corps or one of our partners.

NM:  What else should people be aware of regarding this new resource from Mercy Corps?

RA:  It is important to Mercy Corps that the whole community mobilization approach is grounded in the human rights perspective.  It’s fundamental that we find ways to get multiple actors to work together.  The community mobilization approach has proven effective at doing that.  It’s about being responsive to communities, rather than coming with external development agendas.  That’s a really important thing that isn’t new to this guide, but is clearly communicated in the guide.  The tools and conceptual frameworks to plan, implement and evaluate community mobilization are housed here.