World Change-Maker: Build Skills in International Development and Social Work by Ann McLaughlin

Author:Ann McLaughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2022-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Grassroots Organizations Grow Organically, Addressing Community Needs

At home and abroad, grassroots organizations usually grow in an organic way: a small group of people coalesce around a particular need or interest. Often there are a few movers and shakers who start initiatives.

How did and do community organizations emerge? In both domestic and international community development, one could say that community development occurs because many organizations tackle the needs in that community: literacy, ­at-risk youth, family planning, clean water, economic empowerment, democracy building, environmental problems, women’s rights, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, to name a few.

For example, here in my rather rural community, we have the dental van for people who cannot afford to go to the dentist; we have the very innovative program where people who cannot afford the exorbitant price of a home of their own can help each other build their houses—a modern incarnation of communities helping raise the roof beams together. The churches, as in many communities, provide meals for the homeless. One person who has ten acres envisions building small shelters for the homeless—a rural version of how to address homelessness.

In other countries, community efforts evolve in a similarly organic way. For example, people in communities in Kenya started bringing orphans to a Kenyan social worker. She first took in four kids; fifteen years later she has forty living at the home and over a hundred that they help in the community. Because so many kids are AIDS orphans or abandoned by alcoholic parents, she also developed programs within her fledgling organization to address the source of the orphans’ problems. As her little children grow up, she builds in ways to help her kids emancipate, go on to college or secure gainful employment.

Likewise for a Rwandan social worker: people knew she would help them after the genocide. Women whose husbands had been killed in the genocide showed up on the Rwandan social worker’s porch asking if she could help them to support their families, now that the breadwinner was gone. The Rwandan social worker started teaching hair cutting and sewing for fifty women at a time. She developed a ­child-care program so the women’s children are taken care of while the mothers are in class or later working.

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