|
Back 
Citizen Participation: Civic Forum |
|||
|
NDI has effectively employed its Civic Forum approach to democracy education and citizen action in numerous post-conflict societies, including Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, East Timor, Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia, and West Bank/Gaza. Sierra Leone is the home of the most recent Civic Forum program, which began in 2003. Civic Forum programs are step-by-step, grassroots initiatives ultimately designed to help citizens organize themselves and participate in political activity. The program is divided into four phases. In most instances, NDI has recruited professional community organizers, civic educators and public policy advocates as resident representatives who direct the program's implementation. Each program phase centers on work with small citizen groups. The first phase is to hire and train a cadre of local field coordinators. When identifying field coordinators, considerations are given to balancing gender and other demographic variables. After receiving training in adult, community-based education and organizing techniques, the field coordinators begin reaching out to existing associational groups (e.g., youth clubs, pensioners association, women's groups, demobilized soldiers, etc.). From within the ranks of the different citizen associations and organizations, discussion groups comprising 10 to 15 citizens are formed. The process of recruiting and training facilitators and organizing diverse groups normally takes four to six months from the time the program begins. The second phase is to educate the citizens in democratic principles and processes. The curriculum balances theoretical principles with the information and analysis about the actual development of democratic institutions and processes in the country where the program is being carried out. The education phase (or the foundation building phase) represents an initial investment in the citizens and has required up to 10 months or more to complete satisfactorily. The third phase is to activate the citizens and begin moving them toward organized collective action to address shared challenges in their communities. During this phase, the field coordinators might help citizens conduct a survey of community needs, map the types of decisionmaking power in the community, organize a candidate forum, solicit information from a government office, or meet with an elected official. Civic Forum then helps citizens build on these initial activities by developing political strategies for influencing decisionmaking - an activity that normally is unprecedented in these types of communities. This begins the fourth phase of the program, which is focused on organizing and advocacy. This phase often includes reaching out to other organizations and potential allies, recruiting additional volunteers, targeting decision-makers, mobilizing citizens and, ultimately, taking direct action to influence political policies and processes. Because of the foundation that Civic Forum creates, citizens eventually are able to sustain and enlarge these actions without NDI assistance. NDI's guided approach to giving citizens the tools to understand democracy in their local context and to change their communities is intended to be self-sustaining well beyond NDI's tenure in the countries where the approach is applied. Civic Forum takes a longer-term, building-block approach, where the educational discussions lay the foundation for collective action. In this case, education is a means to an end. Once the foundation is in place, the discussion groups can begin to focus on different community issues that they may like to resolve. The programs go deeper rather than wider. Ultimately, Civic Forum should result in sustainable political organizing practices. In this way, there are local precedents and processes for continuous citizen participation. Once organizing is an established practice, it also serves as a civic education vehicle. In other words, the process of organizing, which includes the recruitment of volunteers and building support in a community, allows more and more citizens to learn about democratic rights and responsibilities, the structure and function of government, issue analysis and many other citizenship competencies through participation in the organizing efforts. East Timor In 2002, East Timor became the world's newest democracy. Existing political institutions are fragile and relatively untested, however, making this a pivotal period of political development in which it is critical that the East Timorese understand new governmental structures and functions. It is equally important that they understand their role as citizens. To address these issues, NDI's Civic Forum program operates in all thirteen districts of East Timor, providing citizens with the knowledge, skills and guidance needed to be politically active. Since June 2001, twenty-six Civic Forum field coordinators, working in co-ed teams of two, have conducted more than 2,000 discussion sessions. The Civic Forum model teaches citizens about the principles of democracy using a curriculum based on the East Timorese constitution and transition process. Citizens begin the program by participating in small discussion groups, which provide a "protected environment" for citizens to discuss diverging opinions about democracy. In East Timor, educational discussions have concluded and citizens are beginning to take guided political action on issues they have identified as important to their community. The expectation is that, upon completion of the program, citizens have the tools they need to continue their political activism. Through training and support, Civic Forum East Timor has begun to equip ordinary citizens with skills to push for accountability and transparency during the country's constitutional transition. Now citizens are identifying and raising issues with their local officials and engaging members of parliament. Building unprecedented relations with their elected representatives, citizen groups in all thirteen districts of East Timor have brought MPs to local community meetings. Citizens are developing a sense of efficacy as they push their elected representatives to be more responsive. Kosovo Civic Forum Kosovo was launched in the summer of 2000. Nearly two and a half years later, the program has trained hundreds of citizens in the principles of democracy and helped them be-come politically active. Selected and trained by NDI's Civic Forum resident director, 17 Kosovar field coordinators began by organizing community-based discussion groups to educate their compatriots on democratic principles, advocacy and organizing skills. As their fellow citizens became more familiar with these concepts, group participants then started to exercise their newly found skills in guided political action. It is through the guided political action that citizens began engaging public officials on issues critical to their daily lives and ultimately changed the way politics gets done in select communities. Local groups in Kosovo have successfully moved from holding introductory discussions on democracy to identifying community issues, holding town hall meetings, creating advocacy campaigns and inter-acting with their municipal and national representatives. Of the nearly 1,700 citizens who have participated in community discussion groups that NDI-trained field coordinators have conducted, a significant number have been young people. Civic Forum youth groups have proven to be some of the most effective in implementing successful community-based actions. Because these young people are interested in having a voice, they have implemented campaigns creating a dialogue between citizens and elected representatives, transforming the power relationships between them. Multiple campaigns implemented by youth have demonstrated their eagerness to understand the role they can play in making the political process responsive to their concerns. Haiti Civic Forum Haiti began five years ago to help citizens participate in the political process despite poorly functioning local government institutions that do not meet public demands for services and change. Haiti's local government has largely been unresponsive to citizens' needs resulting from a of history of centralized authoritarian government, poorly trained local officials and a dramatic lack of resources. Local officials are unaware of the laws governing local government and their role. Civic Forum's goal is to equip Haitians with the information and support necessary for political involvement and participation in their communities. Thus, the program's motto is: In a democracy, Information + Participation = Power. Civic Forum Haiti began in four communes southeast of Port-au-Prince in 1997 and later expanded to the Artibonite, South and Southeast regions. Although challenged by low attendance during harvesting season when families are more concerned with getting goods to market, the program now operates year round in seventeen out of 135 communes. It begins with a twelve-unit civic education curriculum followed by an "action" phase where local coalitions called "Initiative Committees," engage their elected officials in areas of common concern. The sixteen local field coordinators help community groups identify non-traditional strategies to develop their communities. Some groups have also successfully directed advocacy toward local NGOs to get financial or technical assistance. Other groups have organized the collective effort of citizens to meet a community need. In every case, citizen groups trained by Civic Forum facilitators work to increase dialogue and political participation in an effort to empower citizens in the political process. Albania Initiated in February 2000, Civic Forum Albania has organized over 130 groups and trained nearly 1,500 citizens in three districts of central Albania. The program began in the adjacent districts of Tirana and Durres and was later extended to the district of Kavaje and then to Kruja in 2003. The community groups that span these districts operate under the leadership of 16 local NDI-trained field coordinators. Field coordinators began the program by training the local citizen groups in the principles of democracy, within an Albanian context. Building on this civic education base, the local Albanian field coordinators are now working with many of the groups to identify pertinent community issues and to take political action in support of those issues. The groups that have begun to take action and are slowly changing the face of their local communities through their involvement in the political process. For example, two years ago NDI began Civic Forum discussion groups in Manez. One woman in particular, Mrika Hoxha, demonstrated superior commitment and motivation. In discussions about the roles and obligations of local authorities, Mrika and her group learned that some female-headed households are eligible for higher levels of social assistance if the women meet specific criteria. The women, many who did not complete secondary school, reviewed the laws and found that they, indeed, did meet the criteria and approached the local mayor to gain his support in securing the higher rate of social assistance. The early efforts of the women met with resistance. After being rejected by the mayor, the women approached the prefect of Durres, only to be told that their issue was not within his scope of authority. Frustrated, but by no means daunted, the women reformulated their request of the Manez mayor, who agreed to support their cause and put the issue to the local council. On 27 February 2003, he did and the local council agreed to the increase. The result of the persistent effort is that nearly 30 percent of families receiving assistance will see a 15 percent increase in their monthly support. Twenty families out of 65, benefit from the increase. The female-headed households of Manez expect to see the first increase as early as April 2003. West Bank Gaza Strip Civic Forum began in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1995. As a first step, the program prepared Palestinians to participate in the historic 1996 elections, through voter education discussions and materials distributed by an extensive network of community organizations (e.g., sports clubs, health service organizations, women's associations, student unions). Following the elections, highly-trained facilitators organized democracy education discussions in hundreds of communities to help citizens learn how to work together to influence the new Palestinian governing bodies. Over the course of two years, more than 10,000 Palestinians participated in educational discussions. In 1998, the Civic Forum facilitators founded Civic Forum Palestine, the largest local civic organization in the territories. With NDI assistance, the organization developed an independent capacity to raise and manage funds from multiple sources, and to implement programs aimed at supporting broad-based participation in political processes. Civic Forum Palestine has gone on to bring citizens and public officials together regularly to discuss community issues and public policies. For example, the organization began to institutionalize town hall meetings in 1998 between citizens and public officials. In 2000, the town hall meetings were being used to discuss the proposed Palestinian Labor Law throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Participants in Civic Forum activities also have taken actions to influence public officials. Around the El Bureij refugee camp, for example, citizens organized themselves to prevent the Palestinian Authority from constructing a police station on the site of the community's only soccer field. Bosnia-Hercegovina When Bosnia and Hercegovina began recovering from five years of war in 1996, NDI initiated a Civic Forum program designed to help Bosnians - from all ethnic groups - better understand the democratic implications of the Dayton Accords, and to organize themselves for political participation. Over time, NDI established the program in the areas around the recognized regional centers of Tuzla, Banja Luka, and Mostar. This allowed NDI to work with the three main ethnic groups and help build the country's largest multi-ethnic network of citizen activists. A primary result of these activities was the establishment of the Center for Civic Initiatives (CCI), a Bosnian nonprofit organization working to organize citizens and advance democratic practices throughout Bosnia. CCI, now one of the largest "cross-entity" organizations in the country, mounted a nationwide voter education and election monitoring program for the November 2000 general elections. This effort included more than 100 street stands in various Bosnian regions where volunteers distributed promotional and educational material, raised public awareness about the election, recruited additional volunteers and showed citizens the Voter's List. The effort also brought together a coalition of more than 300 NGOs from throughout BiH, and engaged 5,500 volunteers directly in the election process as poll watchers. This allowed the coalition to monitor more than 70 percent of the polling places and signaled a high degree of Bosnian ownership of the elections. CCI is now working to keep citizens engaged in political activities by strengthening citizen advocacy efforts in dozens of communities.
Contact Information For further information on our Citizen Participation programs, please contact: Aaron Azelton, Director of Citizen Participation Programs aaron@ndi.org Updated June 2003 Back |
|||