Participatory Planning for Community Project Development
Collective and Participatory Project Planning
From Diagnosis to Collective Definition
Once the study of the social conditions the group wishes to address has been developed, and the diagnosis is complete, a process begins. This process converts the gathered data and conclusions into a collective definition, establishing goals, actions, strategies for the required new organization, and more.
Publishing research results or selective dissemination provides a valuable opportunity to extend community action to new actors, bring in new members to the organization, and gain additional support or endorsements for the process. This is a chance to relaunch the action by implementing information mechanisms and socializing for a participatory project definition.
The core group should organize and encourage the most appropriate type of forum, general meeting, or discussion sessions to communicate the results. The aim is to transform these results into a stimulating debate for designing the most suitable actions. To achieve this objective, various engaging media and facilitation techniques should be utilized.
Defining Future Actions
The group, seeking maximum participation from population sectors and professionals, must specify the features of future actions and their implementation methods. Key questions to answer include:
- What needs to be done?
- Why and for what purpose?
- Who will be involved or lead?
- Who will the actions address?
- How will it be implemented?
- Where and when will it take place?
- By what means and resources?
Fostering Creativity in Planning
Defining objectives and designing action alternatives is a significant qualitative step, as the group envisions new realities and pathways to achieve them. This moment demands creativity and the capacity for utopian thinking. However, people often find these abilities suppressed; from an early age, our capacity to fantasize may be curbed, and education often steers us towards thinking styles focused on social reproduction realism.
These psychological and cultural challenges highlight the need for the driving group and community workers to employ active techniques. These methods can unlock the hidden or alienated creativity within people, activating imagination without constraints before evaluating possibilities. It involves projecting future desires and dreams. A variety of techniques, or combinations thereof, can foster these processes of mental liberation.
Implementation and Inter-Organizational Context
In this phase of community action, often developed through forums, workshops, or conferences, the primary goal is to establish the group’s objectives concerning the social space to be transformed and the group’s proposed actions (including programming specific tasks). Crucially, remember that diagnosing the situation and defining the operational plan are often processes conducted in parallel.
When community action involves inter-organizational collaboration, the project likely becomes more complex. It must integrate various sectoral action proposals, committed to by different institutions (e.g., sub-associations, diverse professional groups), within an overall project framework. Subprojects within this larger structure allow community action to accommodate various perspectives and sensitivities effectively.