Team Peru

An Organic Workshop

May 21, 2013

Guest Post by Franck Lemperle, Community Social Change Workshop, April 2013

In the last couple of months, since my first day at MIIS, I have been trying to understand what exactly social development means to me. I could not find any answers which would enable me to prove my current enrollment in this school. The world population is over 7 billion people and one third of this number tries to develop its knowledge to keep moving forward, without ever thinking of looking back to see what they provoked. Who is accountable for the hungry or those who do not have enough water? Who is accountable for those two hundred children who will have died in the world because of a lack of food or water by the time I will have finished this paragraph? Am I? Are you? Here is the question I have been asking myself since January.

Being one of these 7 billion people who decides to follow the path of social development is a tough question and needs a deeper reflection to justify any implications in this sector. Social development is not spared from corruption or bad management by those who take advantage of this “market” that might be very lucrative, to the point that they forget the moral code of each of us who is involved to improve the life of millions of people.  The solution is maybe to reduce “the capacity” and to think more like a human being. We must come back to the source of who we are and ask ourselves what is the purpose of what we do? We should think like a human being who has honest ethics on a human scale. The world became capitalistic, and globalization is one of the powerful forces in the world today; did social development take the same path? If so, the first actor who would be reached is the community.

Without a social change background and with only a limited perspective of what I am talking about, AASD has changed my view of what community social change should be and which approach might be the best to help communities in need. What I’ve seen during this workshop is honesty, engagement, sharing, involvement; what I did not see is any barriers between these actors and the community. All these virtues enable a frank contact with communities and lead to a humane and ethical approach which might be the minimum to realize upstream of the process of development. This weekend opened my mind to the process that ought to follow a strategy of community social development. It has to follow an organic way, a human way to build a solid pedestal to improve the lives of millions of people. AASD is the perfect model of an instinct behavior for the sake of social development.

In the context of this workshop, the case study was very helpful to understand what is happening in the Lares region. Working on it in-depth was a very good opportunity to understand these different concepts of what are the main ideas of the community social change. The framework we created during the first day was very powerful and illuminated the case study. Our case study has been theorized thanks to the framework, and both juxtaposed each other. Working on the case study greenhouse project taught me that the community is not always the priority of the different stakeholders and that a lot of work has to be done to address the question:  who has the right to do something in a different cultural context?

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