Villages
Envision and Plan for Their Future
by James Zwier
CRWRC ~ Laos
During the past two months I have mostly worked on one task: helping create and lead trainings for village leaders on yearly planning meetings.
Every community that partners with CRWRC spends a half day in January evaluating the past year, envisioning the future, and planning for next year. The highlight for community members is drawing maps of how they envision their village in the near future. They use these maps to make concrete plans for the next year; for example, fixing the road or building a village fence. The community also evaluates its strength in areas like togetherness, gender equality, and leadership.
In the past, CRWRC staff facilitated these meetings, but we hoped that they would continue after we move on to new communities. At the same time, several village development committees requested training on how to lead the yearly planning meetings. We asked a few nearby communities and brought them together for a three-day training.
I helped create the training along with a few co-workers, using ideas we learned at a workshop on
Dialogue Education last year. Driven by the principle of learning-by-doing, we led the participants through a simplified village planning meeting. On the second day, they split in groups and practiced leading everyone else in yearly planning for a fictional community. On the third day, each group went to their village and led an actual yearly planning meeting with the whole community. Our staff observed as the leaders facilitated the meetings on their own. The training was so successful that we decided to train the rest of our target community leaders as well. We organized a total of four trainings in each area of villages with 10-15 participants each time.
When I see community leaders and members excited about planning for their future, I am hopeful that development will continue even after CRWRC transitions to new villages.
James shared this article from their Newsletter of February 2008. James’ father, Joel Zwier, is a CDET (Certified Dialogue Education Teacher) with Global Learning Partners, Inc.
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