Glossary of Terms

Assets-based approach: an approach in which community members inventory their community strengths and resources so that they can use and build on those strengths and resources to address a health or other issue.

Autodiagnosis: a participatory research process in which community groups explore their own health problems in order to raise awareness and understanding of these problems. This process also fosters the community's confidence in their ability to gather information from their neighbors about topics that concern the community and to learn to prioritize the problems that are identified.

Broader community: refers to the people in a community who are not directly affected by the problem, but who can indirectly influence the implementation of the CM program and whose perspective and support are needed in order to effectively carry out a community mobilization plan. Examples of the "broader community" include service providers and community leaders.

Capacity building: the act of increasing a community's capacity. See "community capacity".

Catalizer: a person or organization that works directly with existing leaders and community groups to stimulate or precipitate action.

Community: refers not only to a group of people who live in a defined territory, but also to groups of people who may be physically separated but who are connected by other common characteristics, such as profession, interests, age, ethnic origin, or language.

Community action cycle: a sequence of phases a community goes through in order to carry out long-term, sustainable development. The steps of the community action cycle are: 1) organize the community for action; 2) explore health issues and set priorities; 3) plan together; 4) act together; and 5) evaluate together. The process described in this website adds a preparing phase and a scaling up phase.

Community capacity: the skills, knowledge, and expertise of community members which individually and collectively constitute a community's ability to identify and address it's needs.

Community development: a process of identifying community leaders, organizing groups or building on existing groups and training these groups and individuals to assess their needs and resources; prioritizing a list of problems that can be addressed; planning a project or an activity; obtaining resources to implement the plan; taking action; and evaluating their impact using the lessons learned to begin the cycle again. Community development takes into account, and is influenced by, the external environment including macroeconomic and political realities and global trends.

Community empowerment: a process by which groups of individuals, organizations, and communities are enabled and share "power" to collectively analyze problems, propose solutions, mobilize and manage resources and act effectively to transform their lives and their environments.

Community mobilization program team: made up of individuals from one or more external organizations who work directly with existing leaders and community groups to stimulate or precipitate the community mobilization effort. This team facilitates the CM process, provides support and advise to and helps build the capacity of the core group and broader community.

Community organizing: involves organizing or strengthening community-level individuals, groups and/or organizations. Community organizing may occur around a specific purpose or may be part of a broader community development process.

Community participation: a social process whereby specific groups with shared needs, often but not always living in a defined geographic area, actively pursue identification of their needs, make decisions and establish mechanisms to meet these needs. Community members' participation in a program or activity can be thought of in terms of a continuum from minimal to very high. At the low end, community members may attend an event such as a health fair that has been planned and carried out by health service providers. At the higher end, community members may identify the need for family planning methods and information, petition the ministry of health to request services and supplies, train local community members to distribute methods and manage their own supplies fund and inventory, etc.

Community team: see core group.

Core group: a group of individuals who lead the mobilization effort on behalf of the community. Also referred to as the community team.

Mobilizer: see catalizer.

Non-formal education: out-of-school learning that is planned and agreed upon by both facilitator and participants and is learner-centered and experienced-based. Learners are encouraged to explore their own reality on the basis of personal experience and voice their own ideas as they work to solve their own problems. It is also known as popular education.

Participatory learning in action (PLA): a community development approach whereby facilitators work with communities to help them analyze their needs, identify solutions to fill those needs, and develop and implement a plan of action. It is based on many different participatory approaches including PRA and RRA (see below).

Participatory research: a method of research in which community members participate to varying degrees in question formulation, design of methods and instruments, and conduct analysis or research and evaluation. This type of research can raise awareness of issues and provide information around which to develop action plans. RRA, PRA, autodiagnosis, and PLA are examples of participatory research methodologies and techniques.

Participatory rural appraisal (PRA): a family of approaches and methods to enable rural people to share, to enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act.

Partner: in this context refers to any formal organization or entity with whom you work jointly to carry out any aspect of community mobilization.

Popular education: see nonformal education.

Positive deviance approach: this approach seeks to help communities identify those who are healthy, study their healthy behaviors and practices and enlist them to model positive behaviors for others who are not practicing these behaviors.

Problem-posing approach: stems from Paolo Freire's methods used to raise awareness of social problems and injustice to incite action of marginalized or disadvantaged groups. The process is rooted in problem analysis, reflection and action.

Program team: see community mobilization program team above.

Qualitative indicators: indicators that measure the quality of change or improvement.

Quantitative indicators: indicators that can be measured or expressed as a quantity or in numbers.

Rapid rural appraisal (RRA): a qualitative methodology used to gather information during (relatively) short but intensive studies in the field. A multidisciplinary team makes use of a range of tools and techniques that encourage local participation in the research process and facilitate the sharing of knowledge.

Scaling up: expanding community participatory approaches beyond a single or limited number of communities to have greater impact at the regional national or even multinational level without diminishing the quality or impact of the approach.

Social marketing: Social marketing is the application of marketing technologies developed in the commercial sector to the solution of social problems where the bottom line is behavior change. (Source: adapted from Andreasen, Alan R. Marketing Social Change: Changing Behavior to Promote Health, Social Development, and the Environment, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.)

Social mobilization: is a process of bringing together all feasible inter-sectoral partners and allies to determine felt-needs and raise awareness of, and demand for, a particular development objective. (UNICEF)

Strength-based approach: identifies and emphasizes the positive aspects of a community's assets and work on an issue or existing behaviors that promote health and well-being. Strength- based approaches promote hope and seek to increase self-efficacy by emphasizing and building upon what individuals and groups have accomplished using their existing resources, skills and abilities and de-emphasizing blame for existing problems.

Sustainability: the quality of a development effort wherein the results/benefits of that effort continue to perpetuate themselves after the initial external inputs have been removed.