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SUSTAINING THE DEVELOPMENT MOBILIZATION CYCLE

One Community Project is Only the Beginning

by Phil Bartle, PhD

Training Handout

Each intervention, each mobilization cycle, each community project, contributes to empowering a community; they must be repeated as a process

Earlier, your work – your intervention – was described as stimulating a social process. The series of activities, (assessment, awareness raising, unity organizing, planning and implementing action, and assessment again), stimulates community strengthening and increased self reliance.

The word "cycle" may be a bit misleading here. Surely at the end you go back and start at the beginning again, but it is a changed you and a changed community. An old Buddhist proverb says that, "The same man can not cross the same river twice," (both man and river become different; they are always changing).

Nevertheless, you want to repeat the essential interventions and stimulate the essential social process. Like a bicycle wheel that goes round and round, each part meets the path farther along each time round.

Meanwhile, you must keep your inevitable departure in mind, right from the beginning of your work. If the community can not develop without you, then it has become dependent upon you. Your enemy is dependency.

While you repeat the cycle, therefore, you aim for your own pull-out, so that the cycle can continue without you. If you are replaced, your notes in your journals, going back to those of Chapter 1, should be the basis for your hand-over briefing to your replacement. If you are not replaced by your agency, you must find and develop potential mobilizing resources from within the community.

© Copyright 1967, 1987, 2007 Phil Bartle
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Last update: 2009.05.06