BERLIN, 31 Maj 2009: En gruppe udviklingseksperter og aktivister har nu offentliggjort den fulde tekst af “Barefoot Guide to Working with Organisations and Social Change”.
Den lille praktiske håndbog skal gøre det lettere for organisationsudviklere at opbygge do-it-yourself selvhjælps-grupper og sociale bevægelser og støtte dem i deres arbejde, skriver den tyske nyhedstjeneste EPO i sit seneste elektroniske nyhedsbrev mandag.
Håndbogen, der er udstyret med tegneserie-agtige illustrationer, retter sig mod den pædagogiske skoling af initiativtagere og andre ledende i folkelige organisatoner og grupper (civilsamfundet).
Forfatterne mener også, den kan bruges af folk, der bare er interesseret i at effektivere den organisation, de er virksomme i.
Udgiver-kollektivet består af udviklingspolitiske praktikere fra organisationerne Community Development Resource Association (Sydafrika), Voluntary Services Overseas (Nepal, Cameroun, Canada), ActionAid (Ghana, Indien), Treatment Action Campaign (Sydafrika), Church Land Programme (Sydafrika) og enkelte uafhængige rådgivere.
Der er tillige bidrag fra Democracy Development Programme (Sydafrika) og Oxfam UK.
Udgiverne skriver i en præsentation:
WHAT IS THIS BAREFOOT GUIDE?
This is a practical, do-it-yourself guide for leaders and facilitators wanting to help organisations to function and to develop in more healthy, human and effective ways as they strive to make their contributions to a more humane society. It has been developed by the Barefoot Collective.
The guide, with its supporting website, includes tried and tested concepts, approaches, stories and activities. Its purpose is to help stimulate and enrich the practice of anyone supporting organisations and social movements in their challenges of working, learning, growing and changing to meet the needs of our complex world.
Although it is aimed at leaders and facilitators of civil society organisations, we hope it will be useful to anyone interested in fostering healthy human organisation in any sphere of life.
The Barefoot Guide is offered free to the world and can be downloaded on this website: www.barefootguide.org
The website also contains a growing library of additional downloadable exercises, readings, case studies and diagrams to accompany the Barefoot Guide.
In this book we offer a perspective on why organisations exist, the real roles they play, and on the importance of supporting the sovereignty of local organisations and social movements for meaningful social change.
You will find here a range of approaches to understanding ourselves and our roles as leaders and facilitators, as we try to understand and facilitate change in organisations. In addition, the significance of relationships and power dynamics in organisations and organisational change processes are explored.
We provide some tools for reading organisations, including how organisations tend to move through various phases of development, how we might facilitate change and the challenges we all face in implementing or sustaining change.
Finally, the guide gives support to processes of building learning organisations, how we can continually learn both from our own experiences and the experiences of others.
