Involving The Community

Provides advice to researchers, community members, and development practitioners on how to improve their ability to effectively reach policy makers and promote change. Covers their roles as a communication actors, how to plan a participatory development communication strategy, and the use of communication tools.

Museums Involving Communities: Authentic Connections explores how museums can become more active and also considers how they might involve members of their local communities in their everyday work. Examining the key components of the museum–community relationship, this book looks at both the impact of museums on the cultural and civic lives of local communities and the impact of local communities on the programs, collections, and organizational culture of museums. Advocating an accessible and inclusive approach to museum management, Kadoyama focuses on the role of museum leadership in fostering and deepening community relationships. The result offers insights into how relationships between communities and museums can be forged in practice, how museums can be involved in building healthier communities, and how community engagement strategies can be developed, implemented, and evaluated successfully. Written by an experienced museum professional with extensive experience in community involvement and audience development, Museums Involving Communities is key reading for museum workers looking to make an impact, while building long-term relations with local communities, to the benefit of both museum and community. It should also be of great interest to students taking courses in museum and heritage studies.

Participatory Development Communication: A West African agenda

Volume 5 of the Focus Group Kit is absolutely essential for those who need to teach others how to conduct focus group interviews, particularly non-researchers within a community. The book includes countless tips, advice and exercises.

Ethical Considerations for Research on Housing-Related Health Hazards Involving Children explores the ethical issues posed when conducting research designed to identify, understand, or ameliorate housing-related health hazards among children. Such research involves children as subjects and is conducted in the home and in communities. It is often conducted with children in low-income families given the disproportionate prevalence of housing-related conditions such as lead poisoning, asthma, and fatal injuries among these children. This book emphasizes five key elements to address the particular ethical concerns raised by these characteristics: involving the affected community in the research and responding to their concerns; ensuring that parents understand the essential elements of the research; adopting uniform federal guidelines for such research by all sponsors (Subpart D of 45 CFR 46); providing guidance on key terms in the regulations; and viewing research oversight as a system with important roles for researchers, IRBs and their research institutions, sponsors and regulators of research, and the community.

This publication describes a small international initiative to examine how local communities can undertake the above tasks of democratization with specific reference to the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication. Communities may have been active participants in proposing inputs which were aggregated and shared in the formulation of the guidelines, yet their role in monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the adopted texts is peripheral. At best, they watch implementation undertaken in their name, but as passive observers. A radical change is needed in order to mainstream community participation into the implementation and monitoring of guidelines of the type described above. There is a need to “take back voluntary guidelines to the community”; demystify their contents; assess with the community what indicators will be utilized to evaluate the progress of implementation; and think through with them the nature of tools to be used for this purpose. Basically, the call is for a democratization of the implementation and monitoring of voluntary guidelines, making them by, for and of the community.