{"id":797,"date":"2014-11-09T16:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-09T11:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dvara.com\/what-we-do\/excited-about\/cities\/blog\/?p=797"},"modified":"2014-11-09T16:59:32","modified_gmt":"2014-11-09T11:29:32","slug":"community-outreach-engagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dvara.com\/what-we-do\/excited-about\/cities\/blog\/2014\/11\/09\/community-outreach-engagement\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Outreach & Engagement"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dinesh Lodha, IFMR Finance Foundation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The emphasis on empathizing with the community, as part of the Design Thinking<\/a> approach that we applied in Ranganatha Nagara, Srirangapatna, allowed us to deeply embed ourselves with the local residents in understanding their requirements and also helped develop familiarity with them. Such effort we believed would be a crucial ingredient in the run-up towards the community engagement workshops that we had planned.<\/p>\n

With an area that spanned 75 households, we thought it was best to conduct these engagement workshops at a granular level so as to arrive at a more inclusive and detailed understanding of how the residents envision their community\u2019s future. This required us to segment the households into three workshops that we had planned to conduct over a period of time.<\/p>\n

\"Img1_cities_91114\"<\/p>\n

In the run-up towards each workshop we undertook a build-up process that in addition to inviting residents personally, was also aimed at priming the households about the upcoming workshop and its intent. The process allowed us to engage the households in a meaningful way about their aspirations and also was a opportunity to reach out to all sections of the society irrespective of their background.<\/p>\n

The build-up process<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Img2_cities_91114\"<\/p>\n

Having split the area into workshop segments, the field team undertook the build-up process for each designated area where the workshop was to be conducted next. The process involved:<\/p>\n

Presentation:<\/strong><\/em> We had prepared a presentation in Kannada that we ran through with each household. The presentation outlined who we were, what was our objective, and gave an overall sense about the process and how each household\u2019s active participation could determine their, and the community\u2019s future, in general. Largely visual, the presentation also included a case study of Hivre Bazar <\/em>(Village in Maharashtra) about how the community got together and deliberated on issues that the community faced and collectively identified ways to address them.<\/p>\n

\"Img3_cities_91114\"Making a presentation outside each household<\/em><\/p>\n

Vision Sheets:<\/strong> <\/em>During a visit to each household we asked the respondent from the household to answer three questions of a questionnaire we called the \u201cVision Sheet\u201d. The questions were open-ended and were addressed to the respondent in Kannada and the field team wrote down the answers in the local language. The questions were:<\/p>\n