Self-Reflection: Obstacles to and Enablers of Constructive Engagement

 Question: What are the obstacles to and enablers of constructive engagement by communities to protect children during humanitarian crises? 

The community, including the school, is the important social environment in which children grow up and develop all kinds relationships with people such as friends, neighbors and teachers and so on.

I recognize that even in humanitarian crises, communities themselves still have  resources that help support and protect children. There are various ways and means to engage with communities and empower communities to enable their own agency decision-making and resilience. 

There are two main approaches to constructively engaging with the community: a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach, depending on the current state of the community and the severity and length of the crisis.

When my organization carried out projects for children of migrant workers in the community, we cooperated with schools, gained the trust of parents, and successfully started the work. Subsequently, we designed extracurricular activities based on the needs of parents and the school schedule, making these activities popular with parents.Later, through the summer hosting activities, we coordinated parents to help each other solve meal problems. Parents start to get involved in event management. Finally, we launched the Parent Management Committee and realized the Parent Management Project.

Event space issues limit institutional growth. The government-led community is unwilling to provide the necessary space for activities. In other words, our activities are bottom-up, and the community has not received instructions from the superiors, nor is it willing to intervene to support our community activities. This is our biggest barrier to entering the community.

The government tightly controls social activity and is reluctant to see spontaneous, self-managed institutional activity. Instead, it tries to place these activities within its management system. This to some extent destroyed the efforts in the community

Self-Reflection: Obstacles to and Enablers of Constructive Engagement