When I served in the Peace Corps, one of the things that was expounded on in training was the necessity to include local people in any sort of project planning. The tool that we were taught to use is called PACA: Paticipatory Analysis for Community Action. During our lectures on Experts, Sharing, Participation, and Community, I was struck by how much of the material echoed or fit into what we had learned as volunteers. I'll admit, I was 100% skeptical of PACA when we were taught it in Pre-Service training. The book looks like a self-help manual from the 1970s, but the principles are sound. I wish I could have taken Ray's course before entering my service!
In PACA, there are a couple key steps to "activating" a community that involve a significant amount of mapping. The first step is to get community members to draw a spatial map of their community. Similar to the 3CM tool learned in class, there is no wrong-way of completing the exercise; the whole point is to see how local people view their village spatially and to derive insights from that (how is the map oriented, what features are highlighted, what areas are left relatively blank, etc). Not only is it a powerful tool for volunteers, but for the local people themselves. Typically, the participants are separated by gender and the different gender groups each draw a map. Then, each map is brought up and presented by the group. The separation can also be done by age (youth, adults). The results usually come as a surprise to both groups and depending on the country, gender roles are very visible in the maps (in our sessions, the men would highlight game halls, soccer fields, transportation hubs, mosques, churches, and bars; the women would highlight markets, wells, streams where clothes were washed, gardens, main roads, homes, churches, and mosques; the main difference in youth and adult maps were the inclusion of schools). Needless to say, the groups were shocked that their maps could be so different for the same community and it served as an important conversation starter.
The second step was to have participants create a generalized Daily Activities schedule, again by gender, starting from whenever they woke up in the morning until they went to sleep. The differences in gender roles was even more apparent, with the main difference being the sheer amount of leisure time men and boys seemed to have compared to women and girls. The women would almost always be up and working before sunrise, preparing breakfast. This was usually followed by laundry, or gathering firewood, or going to market to buy food for dinner. Girls would often have to come home during their school lunch break (if they went to school) to help with chores. The work would be almost constant until after dinner, with the family generally sitting down together. The men would leave the house a little later and work around half the overall time for the women, with the men's work being inter-spaced with naps or visiting friends. Boys would generally be free of chores (left to their sisters) and would instead play soccer with friends. The daily schedule was also an important conversation starter because people had generally never been given the chance to examine and view their lives in this way. Any hesitancy to discuss in the group was usually completely dispelled at this point.
In the end, the local people would perform a basic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for their community using the maps they had drawn. From there, the volunteer would help facilitate project and resource mobilization and fill a role as an information provider.
It was surprising to me how many parallels were found between the lectures and the PACA process, simply because the PACA manual was presented without any fanfare, background, or citations. Seeing now the science that was built into it, I wish the research had been presented alongside the tools; it would have dispelled any hesitancy in using them from the start.
I think it's often easy to underestimate how useful doing mapping and 3CM-type exercises can be. People tend to think we know ourselves very well, and that these types of list-making and visualizing exercises are too simple and a waste of time; however, they almost always bring about new insights that we wouldn't have seen if not for doing the exercise. I remember in early high school we had sessions with a guidance counselor in groups that were supposed to help us make decisions about our futures. We were instructed to make lists of activities we enjoyed and of strengths and weaknesses we perceived ourselves to have, as well as answering the question, "What is success?" At the time, we all thought it was pretty dumb, but I remember once I stopped making jokes about the assignment and actually did it, it turned out to be very helpful in determining my future goals. Coincidentally, when we did the 3CM exercise in this class, my group got the topic of success. This time too, I
ReplyDeletethought the exercise seemed like busy work and wouldn't be that helpful, after all I'm much older now and should know what I want out of life. Again, I was surprised by how helpful doing the mapping was for clarifying what is most important to me, and discussing the differences between my mapping of success with my younger group members gave even more insight into the things I want to prioritize in my life going forward. Even though I started out pretty skeptical of mental mapping exercises, I will definitely be using 3CM in the future.