Share your experience on Mobilising Resources

[Laurence Gilliot]

We are about to embark on collecting a knowledge asset on the practice of Mobilising Resources.

I believe each of you has had, or knows of, an experience where a community has been able to mobilise resources (their own and/or others) to achieve something remarkable. Tell us about that and your role in it. What is the one main message the story makes? Try sharing the experience out loud to a friend or colleague before writing it down. Please add it as a blog on Ning and use the tag “Resources” to help others find it.

To inspire you might read “Beauty meets Quality” from Kerala, India. By acquiring a mirror, a chair and a table, sex workers set up their own beauty parlour. This helps build their self-esteem which in turn stimulates the change to insisting on safer sex.

Based on your experience, what is the ESSENCE (the essential principle) of Mobilising Resources? To prompt you here are a couple of offers:

- one from Guyana: If we apply an individual approach based on personal change; then we do not require a lot of external resources and can tap into the potentials of our own resources

- one based on level 5 of the self-assessment: We use our own resources, access other resources to achieve more and have planned for the future.

We have set up a Forum on Ning called “Share your experience with Mobilising Resources” where we’d like you to share your essence or dream.

Once we have collected a number of experiences we will sort them by common principles for action. If you want to join the series of discussions to generalise these common principles please let me know.

Laurence

PS: If you want to check out knowledge assets on other topics click here

[Geoff Parcell]

Hi Marlou

The words based on Appreciative Inquiry protocols. I think your confusion is because I used the word principle as in “the essential principle” to explain essence.

The idea of essence is a word used in Appreciative Inquiry – it is to bring up the idea of distilling the essence (the essential part) of a plant for a scent or the essence of a flavour for a meal. This will allow people to reflect on their own experience and generalise. It is unlikely to be the whole dream or vision since it will be based on one experience but will be broader than a specific experience. The collection of essences will be a collective dream. Essence is the word I used in the afternoon session in Chiang Mai recently and seemed to work (though it may depend on how Lawan translated it!)

Appreciative Inquiry goes through 4 stages:

Discovery – appreciating that which gives life

Dream – envisioning impact

Design – co-constructing the future

Delivery – sustaining the change

which seems rather familiar to us!

If you already have a dream then post that on this forum too, though others may have to extract it from their experience.

Geoff

[Marlou]

Many thanks Laurence for making this start. That is really inspiring for our new round!
One question for my better understanding, about the example of Guyana and the level 5.
Are we expected to contribute principles (which I think the Guyana example is) or the 'dream' related to this practices (which could be equal to a level 5 if it were well described).
Or are we asking for the 'top principle' in the assumption that would define the dream level?
I was thinking the sum of all principles put into practice would lead to the ideal state of 'mobilising resources' in and AIDS Competent community'?

Thanks,

Marlou