Community Participation and Empowerment
This workshop is designed to create awareness amongst frontline workers and managers to understand a perspective of true ‘community participation’ and to ‘empower’ and enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to make choices and transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.
This workshop will present tools on levels of participation appropriate for different situations and the potential obstacles to effective community participation. A framework of the phases and the processes of participation such as initiation, preparation, participation and continuation will be presented. Interactive discussion will enable participants to share their experiences on the role of the community and different stakeholders in empowering the community. The process and perspective of social participation as the most “empowering” stance will be discussed elaborately. Strategies to people centred approach; enhancing peoples’ level of participation and mechanisms of owning the process, including moving at the pace of peoples’ capacity, will be the focal points of discussion.
Rabindra Nath Sabat is currently working as the Program Director at South Asian Family Support Services (SAFSS). He has extensive experience in organizing and facilitating training programs, workshops and seminars. Prior to joining SAFSS, he worked as the Training Director in Hetta International Training Centre (HIDC) and as the Program Director at the Agency for Women and Children Development in New York. Rabindra Nath has organized and facilitated four international workshops for senior bureaucrats, corporate managers and non-profit leaders from European, Asian and African countries. He has also served as a consultant/ trainer in DSE/ZEL in Germany on “Participatory Planning” for Asian delegates. Rabindra Nath also presented four workshops on ‘Community Participation and Empowerment” at the ISAP Conference 2008 held at Niagara Falls.
