home&community, inc.
improving communities through meaningful participation
"Participation Project"
The purpose of the Participation Project is to win concrete and measurable benefits for residents in community development policy. As residents confront the challenges of devolution, advocates encourage them to engage in existing methods for participation at the local level, however, the home&community promotes the concept of "participation plus." It is not enough that residents are consulted and permitted to participate in community change, after the fact - that is, after policy creation. It sometimes takes more than organizing under the participation mandates of an existing inadequate policy to promote change. Residents want to tell their own stories at the policy table and it is there that they define meaningful participation - setting policy agendas in the initial debate. The Participation Project assists members of the community in identifying their strengths, recognizing that many residents want to work towards improvement and more often than not have strong leadership within.
Through the Participation Project, technical assistance and training is provided to promote policy making through process participation. In addition to training in organizational development and how to conduct outreach, residents and allies are trained how to form beneficial alliances with local decision makers in order to establish relationships whereby they can reasonably expect those decision makers to seek them out during initial debates about housing and community development issues; and, on the other side, those decision makers can reasonably expect to receive good, relevant recommendations from affected residents at the initial debate stage.
A key component of the Participation Project is our University Alliance, through which college students, in a variety of fields -- social work, urban planning, law -- are engaged in the work of organizing and providing technical assistance to communities in need.
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