This Guide and Toolkit outlines why a community-led approach is needed and how to start putting it into practice, using a mixture of real-life examples, key tips and reflective questions.
The Guide consists of seven brief, accessible chapters for all those interested in learning more about community-led work. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the rationale and broad principles that underlie a community-led approach, including the need for humility, sharing of power, and dialogue. Chapters 3 to 7 provide practical advice on how to contextualize and adapt a community-led approach in your own area of work.
Each chapter offers engaging questions, examples, practical tips, and pitfalls to avoid. Each is also linked to practical tools from the Toolkit. These include:
- Facilitation Tools: for helping facilitators, program officers, and managers to reflect on how they do their work and strengthen “soft skills” such as humility, deep listening, and empathy.
- Training Tools: for helping facilitators to prepare for community-led work, or for training program officers and managers about the value of community-led approaches.
- Learning Tools: for helping child protection workers to learn about communities in a way that is deeper, richer, and more contextualized than in prepackaged assessments and situation analyses.
- Management Tools: for NGO managers, program officers, funding partners, and facilitators to see concrete examples of planning, action, and monitoring of community-led processes of child protection.