Understanding Community Learning and Social Mobilizing

Group activities can help people understand root causes of health problems and make plans for change. Which activities you use will depend on what you need to know, what you hope to do, and what resources are available. Activities can:

• Bring people together to identify common problems.
• Find out what people feel they need most.
• Gather information about what is causing a health problem.
• Analyze problems to discover their immediate causes and their root causes.
• Gather all points of view in the community. A project will not be successful if some groups or opinions are left out. People will not want to help if their opinions are ignored!

Environmental health is always a community issue, and requires people working together to make improvements. Whether the goal is to reduce the risk of an epidemic, to plant a community garden, to improve the health and safety of people living near a factory or working in a mine, or to address some other environmental health issue, the more people have a shared understanding of the problem and a shared commitment to solving it, the more successful they will be.

Women need a voice: In some communities, women and girls are more likely to participate in organized activities if they are in a group separate from men. The women’s group then presents their ideas to the larger group. This way, women and girls have a chance to speak in a strong united voice before the whole community. By strengthening the voice of women and girls, and building their leadership. To have a shared understanding of health problems, people need to talk to each other. A guided discussion is a way for a group of people to talk to each other and to ask and answer specific questions. 

The “But why…?” activity is one kind of guided discussion. Drawings for Discussion and Body mapping are also kinds of guided discussions. The person who guides the discussion is sometimes called a facilitator or animator. Most of the activities in this book require a facilitator to make sure each person participates to the best of his or her ability, and to help make sure the discussion or activity leads to action.