Versatile, visual tools for community engagement
As a professional charged with aiding people in developing countries, you no doubt deal with challenges of language, culture and disparate education levels. You may not be aware of the consistent success of Metaphor Mapping in overcoming these challenges for the past 25 years.
We’ve found that everyone can relate to the inherent structure of villages and rivers. They are happy to engage in applying the related symbols to map out how activities are performed today, imagine how they would best work and plan a sequence of actions along the flow of a river. The symbols allow even the most humble to be heard clearly, meaning everyone can engage fully and no tacit knowledge is left out of analysis and plans. Workshops in Africa, for example, have varied from 6 to 80 people. Mapping levels the playing field and has consistently been highly effective.
Catalyze Collaboration! workshops have been used for management training, health system strategic planning, communication among national-provincial -local levels, health center process optimization, inter-sectoral teaming to mitigate risks of toxic materials and re-organization of a national government. We believe metaphoric tools would also be highly useful for outreach to communities, project planning and gathering local evaluation input.
Here are some links to related posts:
Building teams in developing countries
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