Donate Now

Why listening to community members can lead to systems change

SAYDS MEDIA

November 16, 2022

Community Service,SAYDS MEDIA,SIP

Successful social change needs to be community-driven, and participatory measures have influenced the direction with which our change is intended to roll out.

Given the topic in question, it’s normal to ask about social change, how different it is from politics, and how one can contribute to it effectively. Social change is an alteration in the interactions and interconnection of human beings influenced by culture, beliefs, and behavior, among other things, over a duration of time. The result is a change in how people live, whether positive or negative. Yet what are the temporal dimensions of social change and how much impact is needed to classify as such?

Dinner-158 (1)

Social Change & Systems Change

The interaction and interconnections of the components within a system can influence how things operate. The network effect can target the political, religious, perspectives, and mental models of stakeholders within the systems. In most cases, social change spreads from one person to become a mass scale.

Communities understand their social problems best and frame them differently regarding factors such as their severity or novelty. Because of that, the community has the supreme power to accept or oppose social change. Successful social change needs to be community-driven, and participatory measures have influenced the direction with which our change is intended to roll out.

SAYDS fellows, with in-depth and ever-growing knowledge of systems thinking, embarked on the journey of contributing to social change concerning complex social problems that their communities were facing.

The Case Study

Children living within the streets of Kisumu city have and exist in Kisumu City.  The community around the city of Kisumu became the center of our social change. Their participation in solution development was geared towards shaping our purpose on that specific complex social problem, the existing and lacking knowledge and expertise within the community, resources needed, and the legitimacy of the actions we intended to encourage. Our interactions with the community through a robust feedback mechanism created a sense of unity with advocacy groups already handling the social problem.

As systems thinkers, we identified lapses in previous participatory approaches by others and even our past outreach efforts. The main takeaway – the stakeholders who were adversely affected by previous solutions to the problem lacked a voice. To research the issue more prfoundly, we collected and analyzed the data to develop informed insights intended to influence policy within the local government.

Influence of the law

As a tool to influence, one of the key stakeholders targeted by the SIP delivery strategy was the respective committees’ leadership within the county assemblies. To bridge the champion gap directly and provoke empathy for our social problem, we aimed to present our insights to the legislators directly. Developing our presentations, participant feedback from the community and not-for-profit organizations working with the spaces was valuable. We hope to track it and learn more about its power to  influence future policies.

SIP as a living document within society

Throughout the document’s life; it has been designed to be revised periodically to factor in the changing complex nature of social problems. This characteristic can be viewed as an opportunity to empower communities with continuous knowledge and to help shape  ever-changing informal rules that influence the interactions among a system’s components. Ownership has been a key factor in a SIP, considering the transdisciplinary guidelines used to come up with questions and collect data. SAYDS is committed to this process through organized SIP mobilization forums within the respective counties.

Tag Post :
SAYDS
content.png
Share This :

Recent Post

Volunteer

You will be placed in the appropriate team or project depending on your skills and experience. Please reach out if you can assist us in any of the following fields:

I WANT TO VOLUNTEER

Categories

Systemic Thinking
Systemic Insights
SIP