Mobilization Insights from Georgia

Photo: Tamuna Kvaratskhelia/Mercy Corps

Community Development is the process of social change, a community (as a social unit) will develop over time by itself and an outsider will not be able to develop a community. Community Mobilization is the process of stimulating, encouraging and guiding members of the community; as an outsider one is a catalyst and stimulant to the Community Development process. Community Mobilization is a process, which will lead to a community’s development. The Community Mobilization approach builds on the community’s capacities, skills and assets, instead of the community’s problems. The situation will vary from community to community; nevertheless, there are common elements and problems.

One of the very important challenges in the process of Community Mobilization is the large contribution from the donor agency. Donor agencies want to help, while community members want to receive. However, bringing in outside resources contributes to the dependency syndrome and reduces the chance for a project to be sustainable and a community to be self-reliant. The only solution is to use the donor funds as a hook for community mobilization and work very carefully on incorporating and highlighting the community’s internal resources. Program staff should always remember that the community is full of possibilities and creative ideas. Many of the capacities in a community are not recognized. One of the main tasks of a Community Mobilizer is to help the community find these assets and ideas and build relationships within the community to enable the mobilization and utilization of these assets.

Participation is a key element of mobilization and good mobilization ensures a high level of participation in resource identification, decision-making, prioritizing problems and finding creative solutions to address these problems. Everyone who has worked in community mobilization agrees that the beginning of the process is quite challenging. In Georgia, during the Soviet era, problem identification and resolution was the business of specialists. The opinions of ordinary people were not considered seriously. It is very difficult to change the behavior of people who have never been required or asked to participate in the decision-making process, regardless of their education or social status, even if these decisions directly affected their daily life.

However, all these challenges become much more problematic for a Community Mobilizer who works with ‘winner communities’ (communities identified by a donor for different reasons - our case along the BP/SCP pipeline). In this case people have huge expectations, they revert back to Soviet times when ‘somebody’ (i.e. government) took all the responsibilities for decision-making and problem solving. In our experience many communities initially refused to participate, were usually unhappy with the amount of funding the donor was contributing and they refused to contribute labor, materials or cash. The techniques used to overcome this problem were 1) patience-work with each community trying to show the benefit of participation 2) cross visits-site visits to successful community projects and 3) step by step-slowly involving more and more community members into process. By incorporating these techniques we have been able to get the support of 24 of the 25 communities we are working with in the Community Investment Program-East (CIP-E) project. We will continue to utilize these techniques and eventually the 25th community will also start to participate in the program.