Toolkit
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Section 1: Facilitation (FAC) Tools
These reflective tools offer facilitators a means of deepening and enriching their support for community-led work. For facilitators, program officers, and managers alike, these tools can help to strengthen the “soft skills” of child protection work such as humility, deep listening and empathy, and advance their journey of reflective practice.
It is useful to engage with these tools before, during, and after the training workshop to prepare you for facilitation in a community-led approach. Extensive practice followed by reflection is needed in order to master the skills these tools seek to develop.
The tools may be used individually or in small groups. This section enables individual reflection by providing space for reflective writing, using a workbook format. Each tool in this section requires 60–90 minutes to complete.
On an ongoing basis, it is useful to think about which skills you need additional practice on, which challenges (internal or external) make it difficult for you to use a particular skill, and how you will take steps to improve. In small groups, you may want to reflect with three to five colleagues, with group discussion of the questions posed in these tools and of what can be done to deepen particular skills within your agency.
Section 2: Training (TRN) Tools
Effective training of facilitators is best done by or with people who have first-hand experience in using community-led approaches.
This section makes extensive use of participatory role-plays, with group reflection on the process and how to improve the facilitator’s skills.
A useful approach, however, is to intermix these activities with the reflective activities promoted in Section 1.
For example, if a person who is learning how to facilitate a community-led process shows during a role-play a need for additional practice regarding empathy or asking probing questions, one could have the participant complete that evening the relevant tools on empathy (FAC 4) and asking probing questions (FAC 6).
Section 3: Learning (LNG) Tools
Although there are many different ways of learning about communities, this section features ethnographic methods.
Ethnographic methods enable learning about children’s lived experiences, bring forward the views of local people, and build the deeper levels of trust and respect that are needed for community-led work on child protection.
The tools were developed and used in Sierra Leone (with some modifications) but can be adapted to many different contexts. The Sierra Leone emphasis is presented here in order to show a contextually specific adaptation of learning tools.
Although this section focuses specifically on the early phase of learning about (and with) the community, the tools from previous sections are relevant as well.
For example, it can be useful to think through how the people who will be collecting information in communities might benefit from first using several tools related to empathy (FAC 4), asking probing questions (FAC 6), and enabling inclusive dialogue (TRN 7), among others.
Section 4: Management (MGM) Tools
The tools in this section invite managers and other users to reflect critically on their agency’s approach to engaging with communities and to consider a more community-led approach.
This section also recognizes that many managers will have a host of practical questions about things such as qualities to look for in facilitators, the phases of engaging with communities, and the kinds of benchmarks one can use to tell whether one is on a productive track, among others.
Recognizing that there are no “final” or universal answers to these questions, the tools in this section seek to give illustrative examples that stir the imagination and invite one to think how it might go in a particular context.
Managers also may find it useful to have a more in-depth look at an example of community-led work, together with tools that were used to support it. For this reason, this section includes a case study from Sierra Leone and some of the tools used as part of the community-led work.
It is important to recognize, though, that there is no one-size-fits-all in regard to community-led approaches. The Sierra Leone example and tools are best seen as illustrations and should not be seen as prescriptions for how to do community-led work.