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To deal with the problems
of American society we must re-create our neighborhoods; neighborhoods will not change
for the better without our young people as a driving force, in partnership with caring
adults.
The Institute of Cultural Affairs is a global organization for social change. Since
the early 1960s, its major focus has been on comprehensive human development at the
local level, making an impact on the economic, social, cultural, and political life
of the community. It promotes social innovation through community building, with
the full participation of the people that it reaches. With only a small paid staff
in the U.S., the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) is able to maintain a worldwide
network of associates, trainers, and volunteers.
Project work has spanned thousands of communities in 35 countries. The most intensive
phase began in 1975-76, when ICA launched a human development project in each of
the 24 time zones around the world: from an aboriginal community in Australia to
West Berlin, right up against the Wall; from the Marshall Islands, where the project
contributed to their independence, to a fishing village in Nigeria. The project sites,
mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, were chosen for their symbolic value but had concrete
effects; for example, the people in an Egyptian village no longer suffered from bilharzia,
a disease caused by parasitic worms, after they had built a new water system and
no longer needed to use water from the Nile. This global effort culminated in the
International Exposition of Rural Development from 1983 to 1985, with steering committees
in 55 countries and a central conference in New Delhi, where, of the 700 participants,
80% were grassroots practitioners.
Decades of experience in working with people from many cultures and walks of life
in order to gather and harness the collective wisdom of the community led the ICA
to develop the "Technology
of Participationô" (ToP),
a proven, highly transferable series of techniques for enabling the people of a village
or neighborhood to become the initiators, owners, and drivers of the community development
process (for more information on how to replicate the ToP, see "Techniques for
Working with Groups").
Phase One:
Three Deep Roots
Throughout its history, the work of the ICA has been rooted in three areas that have
contributed to its growth toward Community Youth Development:
- helping individuals gain an authentic
sense of personal freedom and self-confidence,
- creating sustainable human community
at the village/neighborhood level,
- sharing effective processes of
participation with communities and organizations of all kinds.
1. Imaginal Education
This approach to learning, called Imaginal Education, is built on the philosophy
of Dr. Kenneth Boulding (Boulding, 1961), which states that:
- We operate out of images as well
as data
- Images provide self-understanding
and are key to self-esteem and behavior
- Images are key to deep motivation
and future direction
- These images are externally and
internally stimulated and can reorganize and change
- When the image changes, our behavior
changes and options for the future are shifted
ICA staff developed methods embodying
this philosophy and piloted them in the mid-'60s with youth gang members in the inner
city of Chicago. Later, these methods influenced school improvement initiatives across
the country in the areas of curriculum development, classroom preparation, and the
formation of school change cadres. Thousands of school teachers and social workers
were trained in Imaginal Education. It is impossible to know how many young people,
through their efforts, came to experience the freedom to "be who they decide
to be."
In later years, Training, Inc., a welfare-to-work prototype program based on the
principles of Imaginal Education and operating in seven U.S. cities, has proven to
be one of the most effective of such programs in rates of job placement and retention
(Dimensions of Personal Change, 1992).
2. Replication of Human Development Projects
ICA human development projects have always elicited and valued the contributions
of all age groups; however, several examples of systematic, large-scale replication
of these projects made it especially clear how valuable young people can be in the
economic, social, and cultural development of their communities. Whenever a village
in Kenya, for example, wanted to join "The New Village Movement," or a
village in India wanted to join "Nava Gram Prayas," they were asked to
find ten volunteers who would commit to serving their own and other participating
villages for one to two years.
These volunteers were invariably young people, often with little formal education.
After a three- to six-week intensive Human Development Training School, they were
assigned to village leaders as auxiliary staff to help mobilize village participation
in development activities. Through the energy and care of hundreds of these young
men and women, the ICA reached 1,200 villages in Kenya alone, often resulting in
dramatic transformation.
3. The Technology of Participation
The third root of ICA's growth toward working in Community Youth Development was
the development of the Technology
of Participation (ToP)
course system (see "Techniques for Working with Groups"). From 1986 to
1996, the ToP faculty grew from 2 to 200 trainers, who equipped more than 10,000
change agents with structured participatory processes for group facilitation and
planning. It was through this skill transfer that the ICA developed collaborative
relationships with several individuals and organizations in the youth development
and community development fields.
In 1993, the National Network for Youth brought nine of these people together, of
whom I was one; we came up with the term Community Youth Development (CYD) and its
initial foundational principles. My presence on this "guide team" provided
the ICA with a way to work toward making one of ICA's four strategies for the 1990s--"Inspiring
the Next Generation of Social Innovators"--a reality.
Phase Two:
Conscious Participation in CYD
As a faculty member of the National Network for Youth's CYD project from 1994 to
1997, I found that many opportunities emerged for the ICA to collaborate with youth-serving
organizations at the national, regional, and local levels. ToP methods became a central
element for equipping the project's Learning Resource Team (LRT) to carry out the
CYD mission. Since 1994, over 30 two-day training events in ToP Group Facilitation
Methods have been organized, often co-led by LRT members and involving approximately
200 young people and 400 adults nationwide.
This is just the beginning of what could be an extensive transfer of skills and methods;
several networks, such as the National Network for Youth, the National 4-H Council,
and Women in Community Service, are gearing up for systematic training with their
constituencies. To this end, 14 LRT members are already a part of ICA's ToP faculty.
The value of ICA methods for CYD is clear from the response of workers in the field.
"One of the highlights has been how quickly young people working as peer educators
have picked up the methods and how valuable it is for their work with other youth
living in high-risk situations," according to Gail Kurtz of Southeastern Network
for Youth and Family Services.
Amy Crippen, of SYNERGY, Kansas City, wrote, "Each and every community group
I work with has expressed their own appreciation of the methods. They promote creativity,
collaboration, and consensus, and seem to bring depth and safety to most discussions.
Staff see their work transformed to larger documents and policies."
Meanwhile, ICA was making strides towards making CYD a conscious priority. Some examples
of these moves:
- The "Apprenticeships in
Social Innovation" program in the Phoenix office was expanded. This program
allows young people to gain an indepth experience with ICA's ToP and community development
methods.
- For the first time ever, a young
person was elected to the national board of directors of ICA USA.
- A national CYD initiative was
declared at the April '97 board/staff planning retreat that will feed into a major
conference in the year 2000.
- As a result of a CYD delegation
attending ICA's Global Conference on the "Rise of Civil Society" in Cairo
in September 1996, people from eight countries signed on as initial members of an
International Institute of Community Youth Development (IICYD). The IICYD will promote
the exchange of CYD learnings across nations and cultures.
The Next Phase:
CYD and Local Community Development
In addition to the international promotion of CYD, the ICA is well suited to contribute
to this field closer to home, by focusing on how CYD plays itself out at the most
local level, the neighborhood. Just as the major global breakthrough of the last
quarter of the twentieth century in the field of community development has been the
participation of women as full partners in development initiatives, surely the major
breakthrough of the first quarter of the twenty-first century will be the full participation
of young people. To deal with the problems of American society we must re-create
our neighborhoods; neighborhoods will not change for the better without our young
people as a driving creative force, in partnership with caring adults.
ICA is involved with CYD in the following areas:
1. Strong collaborative relationships with a variety
of national organizations and regional networks
focusing on this dimension of CYD, as well as
with local entities such as San Diego Youth and
Community Services; the El Puente Academy for
Peace and Justice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the
Neighborhood Partnerships Program in Phoenix;
and the Uptown-Edgewater Youth Leadership
Development Collaboration in Chicago.
2. A recent updating and repackaging of ICA's com-
munity development wisdom through a partner-
ship with the Jacobs Family Foundation's Center
for Non-Profit Innovation in San Diego. An
intensive six-month pilot is under way with the
community of Sherman Heights in San Diego to
build the capacity of a youth/adult core group to
facilitate the whole community in doing its own
development.
3. Broad recognition of the importance of ToP
methods within the field of CYD.
Although ICA's national CYD initiative is still being formulated, a current image
is that there would be two main strategies.
The first strategy would be to work with existing CYD collaborations, focusing intensively
on one or more of the local communities involved. In these communities, youth/adult
core groups will work at building their capacity to catalyze comprehensive and sustainable
human development at the most local level. This strategy would have as a resource
the community development curriculum/ process now being piloted in San Diego. A learning
network of projects would include initiatives that come from various entry points--businesses,
schools, social service/youth-servicing agencies, faith communities--but always with
a focus on neighborhood residents being at the center of the process and being the
primary beneficiaries of the capacity-building.
The second strategy would involve the widespread training of young people across
the country in ToP methods, for the sake of engaging the American public in deep
and meaningful dialogue about how we want to enter the twenty-first century. One
possible scenario would be to facilitate community forums across the country that
would result in "A People's Agenda for America's Neigh-
borhoods." Hopefully there would be enough participation in the creation of
this agenda that party politics for the year 2000 election would not be able to ignore
it.
There are thousands of course graduates and dozens of youth-serving organizations
across the country who use ToP methods on a regular basis and who would love to mentor
young people as they become trained to lead this process. These young people would
then, in turn, be equipped with tools that would enable them to be positive change
agents for communities and organizations throughout their lives and in their own
neighborhoods right now.
These two strategies grow out of the second and third of the "deep roots"
mentioned earlier. A possible third strategy would grow out of the first one mentioned,
Imaginal Education, with its proven effectiveness in welfare-to-work programs such
as Training, Inc. The disproportionate amount of unemployment among young people
in our society makes it imperative that we use whatever wisdom is available in such
programs for building young people's skill and confidence in the future.
Whatever the particular vehicles turn out to be, the ICA's CYD journey is bound to
be a wild and exciting ride, with a large and diverse band of co-travelers--a journey
that I look forward to with great anticipation.
References
Boulding, Kenneth (1961).
The Image. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Burbidge, John. The Technology of Participation: The group facilitation methods of
the Institute of Cultural Affairs. New Designs, fall 1993.
Dimensions of Personal Change (1992). A study sponsored by the Ford Foundation.
Spencer, Laura J. (1989). Winning Through Participation: Meeting the Challenge of
Corporate Change with the Technology of Participation. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.
Executive director John Oyler has been part of the Institute of Cultural Affair's
pioneering efforts in developing inclusive collaboration methods which help groups
deal with change and move towards effective action for over twenty-five years. He
has extensive experience in facilitation, training, planning, curriculum design,
and program development with very diverse groups, including fourteen years working
internationally.
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