Sustainable Community Development

One of the areas of focus this summer with the AMIGOS program has been on the promotion of sustainable community development. While AMIGOS has a long history of working in Latin American countries on promoting community development, and has been working toward community development, this has been a major focus within the Dominican Republic project this year.

Most AMIGOS projects have some sort of Community Based Initiative (CBI), a small project initiated from within a community for volunteers and community members to focus on during the AMIGOS volunteer's time in the community.

How are we different? Here's how:

1. Emphasize the importance of the process of the CBI. While the actual painting of a mural, or the construction of a playground is important, we have worked on training the community youth on the process of the community, its values and strengths, and the visioning process of what possibilities we have for further strengthening these values. As the community and youth become more familiar with this process, they are able to carry out this process (and the subsequent proposal planning and implementation) on their own.
2. We changed the terminology based on cultural meanings. While Community Based Initiative typically translates to "proyecto comunitario" in Spanish, the term proyecto carries the connotation of a large construction-based project. Instead, we are using the term "Iniciativa pequena de la comunidad" to better convey the community-based focus as well as the small-ness of our initiatives (most of our initiatives are within the $350 USD range).
3. Encourage communities to participate in fundraising outside of the AMIGOS proposal process. Many of our communities are supporting significant portions of the "iniciativas pequenas" - some more than 50%, and one is completely supporting the financial aspects of the initiative!

Between these key points of focus in our project, as well as focused training to our volunteers as well as community youth on the Community Based Initiatives and process, we have been having a successful, and in my mind - sustainable, process for working within our communities this summer!