Community Action Initiatives

Core Values and Principles of Community Action Initiatives

• Community action involves activities that increase understanding, engagement, and empowerment of communities in designing and delivering local services.
• The core values and principles of community action include human rights, social equity, gender equality, and participatory development.
• Human rights are universal and inalienable, including the right to life, liberty, and property.
• Social equity involves the fair treatment of human beings, access to resources, and life chances.
• Gender equality ensures equal access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender.
• Participatory development involves involving local populations in creating policies and planning, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating development programs and projects.
• Empowerment is the capacity of individuals to make choices that can produce desired changes in their social, economic, and political lives.
• Advocacy involves fighting for the rights of others and having their concerns addressed by targeting people in positions of power.
• There are three types of advocacy: systematic, individual, and self-advocacy.
• Advocacy work requires a detailed campaign, following a cyclical procedure, including identifying a priority problem, developing achievable aims and objectives, identifying allies and available resources, creating an action plan, and monitoring and evaluating advocacy work.
• Advocacy strategies include raising public awareness, using the media, and considering the impact of online and offline activities.
• Community action initiatives guided by core values and principles can enable people to work in solidarity in addressing social problems and involve the youth in addressing these issues.