The Drum Beat 227 - Communication and Change News and Issues
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There is a saying that change is full of both sadness and opportunity. The CI is experiencing those emotions.
For the past 5 years Denise Gray-Felder ([email protected]) has been Chair of The CI Partners group. As she prepares to leave The Rockefeller Foundation to become President of a new organisation called The Communication for Social Change Consortium [CfSCC] (Click here for the CfSCC site), Denise will hand over the reigns as Chair of The CI Partners Group. Denise's contribution over the past 5 years has been beyond measure as in her unique way, sometimes gentle, sometimes straightforward, always with intelligence, clarity, humour and humility, she has played a key role in guiding the development of The Communication Initiative. We can not sufficiently express our thanks for all she has done. Thank you Denise. Happily both Denise and The Rockefeller Foundation will remain centrally involved in The CI Partners group - Denise through CfSCC as a CI Partner and Rockefeller continuing as a Partner through their new Communication Director Andre Oliver, his colleagues George Soule and Brian Byrd, and a multi-year funding agreement. We want to thank them all.
The new Chair of The CI Partners Group - and here we have the opportunity - elected at the recent Partners meeting in London is Garth Japhet ([email protected]) Founder of Soul City in South Africa (Click here for the Soul City site). We are delighted to have someone with such an outstanding national and international record of substantive achievement and innovative strategic thinking on development issues as the Chair of the Partners group. Soul City was an inaugural Partner in The CI and has made a major contribution to the development over the past 5 years including the recent development of Soul Beat with its specific emphasis on networking, support, information sharing and strategic analysis in an African context (Click here for the Soul Beat Africa site) Welcome Garth.
- Warren Feek
[email protected]
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EXPERIENCES
1. Community-run Preschool Centres - Chile
These community-run preschool centres, known as CCAPs (Centro Comunitarias de Atención Preescolar) were designed to give children a good start in life by providing a stimulating educational environment and promoting proper nutrition, measures which later may help reduce failure and drop-out rates in elementary school. CEANIM's central strategy is the participation of mothers in the development, administration, and organisation of the centres. The mothers (pobladoras, or women from the poor barrios) attended workshops to learn about socialisation, health, hygiene, and nutrition. In exchange for their children's education, mothers gave one period of duty per week (participated in teaching the children) and brought in cleaning supplies once a month.
Contact Dr. María Angélica Kotliarenco Tel.: (56-2) 6330514 or 6380055 or 6321285
2. Journalists Advocacy for Safe Environment & Tobacco Eradication (JASETE) - Ikeja, Nigeria
An NGO consisting of academics and journalists drawn from various media organisations in Nigeria who work to secure a safe, clean environment by preventing tobacco use and advocating changes in environmental policy. JASETE's central strategy involves initiating activities (ie: workshops, forums, awareness days, press releases, etc.) in schools and other public venues that inform citizens about the health risks associated with living in an unclean environment. Journalists and others may also access information in JASETE's media resource centre. Beneficiaries of JASETE's projects and resources are encouraged to tell others about the dangers associated with tobacco use.
Contact Adeola Akinremi [email protected]
3. Manana Youth Cultural Educational Centre - Armenia
Works to encourage creativity among young people aged 8 to 16 years through live performances and a magasine. There is no selection process as to who may participate the Centre; children learn of its projects from their peers. Approximately 50 children participate. Participants produce the magasine Khabarbzik ("gossiper") which is distributed to schools. They also produce live performances based on themes like the Convention on Children's Rights. In this particular production, children produced short video clips to illustrate each principle from the Convention, using humour and imagination to advocate for the right to a home, the right to express themselves, the right to a loving and caring family, the right to protection from guns, the right to a healthy environment, and the right to enjoy their own culture.
Contact Ruzanne Baghdasaryan [email protected]
4. Have Your Say: The AIDS Debate - Global
BBC News has launched a season of its interactive online programme "Have Your Say" called "The AIDS Debate". This project, which involves inviting submissions of photographs, comments, and questions from citizens worldwide via email and online, is designed to provide a forum for discussion of the issues and exploration of the facts surrounding HIV/AIDS. On the AIDS-specific "Have Your Say" web page, visitors are invited to question world figures and tell their story. While the page provides facts and information about HIV/AIDS, its focus is on exchange. Various question points and "assignments" are put to visitors to engage them in interaction with each other and with specific leaders in the fight against AIDS. Comments, stories, and photographs are then featured on the site.
Contact [email protected]
5. Lao Red Cross Youth Peer Education Program - Lao PDR
2-day youth peer education workshops are structured to train rural youth to talk to their peers about making informed decisions about behaviours that may place them at risk of contracting HIV or sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The central message of the workshops: everyone is at risk. During the current phase, the programme is working to cultivate sensitivity to gender differences in its HIV/AIDS peer training workshops. Attention to the capacities of the young participants is another key strategy. Many of the participants are illiterate or have only a few years of elementary education. For this reason, workshops include visual aids (a colour flipchart), pictures, and role-playing rather than note-taking and pamphlet distribution.
Contact Dr. Soulany Chansy [email protected] OR Neil Poetschka [email protected] OR Elden Chamberlain [email protected]
6. Public Radio Exchange (PRX) - United States
A non-profit online service for peer review, acquisition brokering, and digital distribution of audio content for public radio programming. Designed to enable communication between producers and stations (and station-to-station linkage); to build a fair market for creative audio content; and to create more opportunities for diverse programming. Stations who subscribe will pay a flat fee that permits acquisition of approx. 120 hours of programming per year. A web-based interface will enable browsing and searching for pieces uploaded by producers by keyword, topic, length, format, rating, review, producer, and other criteria. PRX maintains email discussion lists, made up of producers, stations and experts in the public radio world. These practitioners advise and give feedback to organisers as they develop and implement the programme.
Contact [email protected]
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Do you agree or disagree?
For more effective development communication interventions we need more artistic creativity and less performance based results planning.
[For context, please see The Drum Beat #226]
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PLANNING MODELS
7. The COMBI Design Process (CDP): Ten Steps for Designing a Communication-for-Behavioural-Impact (COMBI) Plan
1. State Overall Goal
2. State expected Behavioural Results/Objectives...
3. Conduct Situational "Market" Analysis vis-à-vis Precise Behavioural Result...
4. Present an overall strategy for achieving stated behavioural results...
5. Present the COMBI Plan of Action...
6. Management...
7. Monitoring...
8. Impact Assessment...
9. Scheduling...
10. Budget...
8. Eleven Deadliest Sins of Knowledge Management
by Liam Fahey & Laurence Prusak
Includes:
#4 - Failing to see that managing knowledge must also be about creating contexts for sharing...
#8 - Focusing on past and present, and not the future...
#10 - Replacing human contact with technological contact...
9. The Sustainable Livelihood Approach
A methodology for the design, implementation and evaluation of Sustainable Livelihood programmes at the country level.
a. Assessment of the risks, assets, entitlements and indigenous knowledge base found in a particular community...
b. Analysis of policies...
c. Assessment of technology...
d. Assessment of investments to help or hinder...
e. Integrating above steps...
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Soul Beat Africa
...African choices...critical voices....crossing borders....African stories...
Click HERE!
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STRATEGIC THINKING
10. Breaking the Frame - Susan Nall Bales Has a Lesson for Progressive Groups: Message Matters
by Chris Mooney
Susan Bales applies over forty years of social-science research toward an approach called "strategic frame analysis" designed to "help progressive groups understand public prejudices and thereby better advance their objectives." A running theme in Bales work is that the "media's penchant for anecdotal or human-interest stories distracts from a more systemic presentation of social problems. In fact, such coverage places implicit blame on individuals, rather than government or society, for hardships and is thus inherently hostile to liberal policy solutions..."
11. Online Advocacy Principles and Case Studies within the Context of ICT and Conflict Transformation
Information Communications Technology in South Asia, as well as in the rest of the world, is an experiment in progress... In planning for and using ICT, many countries often concentrate on ICT itself, rather than what they want to accomplish through it. It must be remembered that ICT is a means to an end, not an end in itself... This paper concentrates on the increasing confluence between ICT and Conflict Transformation.
12. Summary of Indigenous Media: Is it hurting more than it is helping their cause?
by Nafeesa T. Nichols
Reviews the use of modern media, and video in particular, as a communication tool for the Kayapo tribe, an indigenous community from Brazil. Their cultural practices and unique customs are presented within a dialogue that the author uses as a way to debate the positive and negative implications of modern media. "Indigenous society is one step ahead in the fact that they are, for the most part, fully aware of the implications of bringing this technology into their world..."
MATERIALS
13. Missing the Message? 20 Years of Learning from HIV/AIDS
by Thomas Scalway
This 66-page report from The Panos Institute asserts that while current international interest, funding and mobilisation for AIDS are creating a unique opportunity to build an effective response to the crisis, few of the lessons of the past are contributing to current approaches.
14. Games for Adolescent Reproductive Health: An International Handbook
by A. Hendrix-Jenkins, S. Clark, W. Gerber, J. LeFevre, R. Quiroga
Outlines how games can be used to provide youth with information and skills about sex and sexuality to protect them from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), AIDS, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, rape, and emotional and physical violence. It includes relevant theory, 45 games to play, card sets to photocopy and cut out, and tips on how to create your own games.
15. Justice for All: Promoting Environmental Justice in South Asia
This report suggests that the environment debate needs to move beyond conservation and protection to accountability and justice issues.
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The Drum Beat seeks to cover the full range of communication for development activities. Inclusion of an item does not imply endorsement or support by The Partners.
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