Campaigns to End Violence against Women and Girls - Virtual ...

KEY ISSUES IN COMMUNITY MOBILIZATION
� Community assessment must precede any community intervention, so that
planned activities match the needs and assets of the target audience. Participatory
research such as participatory rural assessment, and participatory strategy and/or
action planning with prospective target audiences are most likely to yield the rich
qualitative information needed, and to generate momentum for the campaign. See
also Campaign Planning and Campaign Strategy in this module for guidance and
tools on campaign research and analysis.
� Ensure that the community mobilization strategy is based on a theory of
change. There are a number of theories based on psychological and social sciences
that provide a framework for thinking about pathways to change.
� Communicating, early and clearly, the purpose and nature of the campaign
prevents raising and disappointing expectations, e.g. any hopes by members of the
community to receive immediate benefits such as financial support, etc.
� Participative monitoring and evaluation with target audience members helps to
understand what change means within the particular community. What may seem
irrelevant to an outsider can be a bold step forward within a particular community.
� To prevent message drift or local activities that may conflict with the campaign
strategy, community activities should be accompanied and monitored by experienced
campaigners who can solve issues arising around misinterpretations in a
constructive, participatory process.
The initiators of Raising Voices argue for comprehensive community mobilization,
which includes elements of campaigning as well as local projects to improve services:
“Comprehensive community mobilization is . . . .
- Working with the whole community- women and men, young people, and children
- Seeking to encourage individuals as well as the community to embark on a process
of change
- Using multiple strategies over time to build a critical mass of individuals supportive of
women’s rights
- Supporting people to face the fact that violence isn’t something ‘out there’ that
‘happens to other people’: it is something we all grapple with in our relationships
- Inspiring and creating activism among a cross section of community members
- Multi-faceted
Community mobilization is not . . .
- Only raising awareness
- Only capacity building
- Working with one sector, group, sex
- Ad hoc or sporadic
- A series of one-off activities
- Pointing fingers, blaming, assigning fault
- Top down programme implementation by an NGO to a community
- Neat and completed within short timeframes
- Message-based”
Raising Voices employs the “stages of change” theory which contains 5 stages as
follows:
229
Campaigns December 2011