Would you like to join in for Community Action Day?

[Rituu B. Nanda]

Stimulating a movement fuelled by local responses

Community Life Competence is expanding. Communities in a wide range of contexts and locations rely on their strengths and take progress on issues of their concern in their own hands. Can we as Constellation members, facilitators and coaches all over the world make large scale progress and involve even more communities, including our own in this movement fuelled by local responses? To do so we propose to organize a Community Action Day.

We often see especially in the cities that people want to re-connect with their community members. This would be a good opportunity to do so. Boris from the Netherlands suggested that he could host such an interaction over a barbeque!

What would the day look like?
On the Community action day communities meet to do their self-assessment and thereafter, make action plans based on the self-assessment. The day will be an occasion where people share, listen, appreciate and support each other. It will also stimulate people to reflect and respond to their concerns.

Sharing with friends around the world
Communities could then share their self-assessment and action plan online with thousands of other communities. Being part of a global movement of change can stimulate them to take action and to connect for learning and sharing.

Partners
We would start from within, with Constellation members and partners in our own network. We could offer to collaborate with UNAIDS on World AIDS Day and RBM on Roll Back Malaria day. We could test it within the Constellation this year and explore it with potential partners in 2011.

We need your help
Do you have any ideas for the day, or would you like to join the working team to plan and coordinate the event all over the world? Please write to me at [e-mail] . I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm regards,

Rituu

[Rituu B. Nanda]

Dear Gaston,

Thanks for your excellent suggestions especially about flexibility on the date. Whatever suits the community is the best option.

Cheers,

Rituu

[Gaston]

Great initiative! I would like to facilitate it with my community I do sports with (i.e. climbing, running) on HIV. We talked briefly about HIV a month ago when a brother of a climbing friend died of HIV and it was still kept quiet. This would be a great opportunity to assess our own community's AIDS Competence.

Also, there is a lot of Dengue Fever in the rainy season here. Together with our community of friends, we'll adapt the Malaria Self-Assessment to Dengue Fever (not many changes actually!). This can't wait until World Malaria Day (25 April), so we'll do it soon on a Friday evening when we always gather.

So ideas would be to allow for flexibility in dates as I am not with my community on World AIDS Day. And I think spreading the idea via FaceBook could really be interesting for my context.

Again, great initiative and looking forward to learn from others' initiatives.