Community-Led Approach
At Outreach International, we believe when communities work together, they can overcome the challenges of chronic poverty.
Our work supports groups who construct new water wells, establish low-interest loan programs, repair roads, grow vegetables, and much more. It empowers people to lift themselves, sustainably, into a future defined by opportunity.
HOW IT WORKS
Lots to Learn
Local Outreach International field staff introduce themselves to community members and explain our work, visiting homes to learn about the community’s residents, demographics, resources and infrastructure.
Let’s Talk
Through conversations, Outreach staff helps community members identify the specific challenges they face. As commonalities are identified between households, individuals are brought together to widen the dialogue.
Audience Participation
With facilitation from Outreach staff, groups of community members come together to share challenges, prioritize their most-pressing needs, consider the root causes of common issues and identify potential solutions. Over time, capable leaders emerge organically from the community during these meetings.
Think it Through
Having explored their issues and identified practical solutions, community members coordinate a plan. Together, they’ll access the necessary resources to implement projects that will resolve local issues, while also gaining new skills, experience and capabilities.
The Right Tools
For instance, a community focused on improving local access to clean water for their first project would access resources to purify and filter existing water sources. In future projects, they may eventually drill new wells or establish complex water systems. It’s up to them.
Showtime
Yeah! Combining Outreach facilitators’ organizational framework with their own passion and determination, the community acquires the necessary materials, harnesses members’ skills, works together with principled purpose, and implements their chosen project.
How’d it Go?
Outreach staff facilitates a community-led group evaluation of the collaboration, reflecting on the project’s challenges and celebrations. Equipped with these insights, community members can continue to strengthen their team dynamics and apply their experience to future projects, growing more unified and empowered with every new outcome.
Let’s Do This Again
Within 5-6 years, a typical Outreach affiliated community garners enough skills, confidence and momentum to function independently, empowered to assess and address challenges through community-led action, without Outreach’s facilitation. It’s more than a cycle — it’s a revolution!
Now that you’re an expert on our approach, sharpen your knowledge of our methodology and the nine-step process we call “Participatory Human Development,” or “PHD.” It’s pretty fascinating, in addition to being super-effective.
FIELD REPORTS
Take a deeper dive into our work with case studies, field notes and research articles.
