Level two Training
Facilitating Dialogue and Community Conversations
Overview
Community capacity enhancement programs are instrumental in empowering communities to respond to their pressing concerns. Community conversation is one of the effective community capacity enhancement programs widely employed to respond to the effects of the AIDS epidemic. It entails a series of facilitated dialogues that provide participants the benefits of exchanging ideas and views on how the community could be affected and how they could respond to contain the spread of the pandemic. It also provides a platform for people to think through the way their cultural norms and values, traditions and individual behaviors affect the lives of children and adults in the community.
CC, throughout its process, highly respects the views and opinions of all participants and preserves the dignity and pride of individuals and families through creating an environment that encourages compassion, acceptance and accountability. Community conversation has demonstrated its success in several countries in that it translates the very principles of participation into practical application by creating opportunities for people to understand, discuss, decide and act on issues affecting their lives.
Major topics to be covered include:
- Identifying stakeholders for coordinating CCs
- Ways of selecting participants of CCs
- Recruiting and training of facilitators
- Principles of adult learning
- Skills and processes that help individuals to actively participate in CCs
Upon successful completion of the training, participants will be able to:
- Empower communities to openly discuss over matters of concern
- Use existing skills and knowledge among communities in order to bring about planned change
- Create an environment that encourages compassion, acceptance and accountability among participants
- Understand key principles of participation and its practical application
- Help communities to map out and discuss over key issues that underpin the challenges affecting their day-to-day lives
- Devise ways of improving attitudes and practices regarding issues of concern among the community where they provide services
- Pay attention to perception and practices around gender roles and stereotypes related to gender that might have an influence over achieving the goals of the CCs
- Summarize and compile the key learning obtained from the CC session