Neighbors Working Together

A Discussion Guide for Community Associations

While Interweave’s efforts to advance business and home rely on individual initiative, community advancement requires interaction and decision-making by many people working together in groups such as village banks or community associations. Interweave’s Success! manual provides instruction for individuals, but the group process requires a different kind of curriculum. Neighbors Working Together is Interweave’s manual to advance group learning and action.

Together participants help each other and solve problems that affect their homes and businesses. To accomplish this goal, they unite to form a community association. They elect officers and choose the name for their association. As an association they discuss and act on the concerns and issues they think are most important and work together to create a community action plan.

For home, participants develop a personal quality of life plan based on six areas of individual need and growth identified by each participant. Group members work together to help each participant learn and follow-through to achieve their specific individual quality of life goals.

Because sustainable community improvement requires participation of many, training focuses on techniques for generating group dialogue, consensus and action. Using illustrations from the Neighbors Working Together discussion guide, participants learn and organize to initiate sustainable community change.

As a tool to assist groups and associations, Interweave has collaborated with global nongovernmental organization, ProLiteracy to create this discussion guide. Utilizing a highly participatory dialogue technique often referred to as FAMA or Literacy for Social Change, the manual presents a wide range of guided discussions generated by illustrations known as “codes.” Most frequently codes are pictures, but they can also be skits, songs, stories, objects or other forms of communication that reflects important realities and issues from the lives of the participants.

Typically each association receives a copy of the Neighbors Working Together and members democratically select the discussion topics that they think are most useful and relevant for their group. The discussion process allows everyone to share ideas and understanding. It also helps groups unite around common action projects to helps solve shared problems. As association members use the guide to advance community action projects, they also help each other in learning about and developing their businesses.

Usually Interweave works directly with a given association for 18 to 24 months, but after Interweave leaves, associations continue independently in the future. Associations developed and nurtured through this process become sustainable by integrating financial capital (interest from loan repayments and community projects), social capital (trust, relationships, donated time and peer support) and knowledge (provided by Interweave materials and training). This sustainability allows programs of individual, business and community development to continue on a locally self-sufficient basis long after the outside intervention is completed.