OUR APPROACH
Overview | Community Engagement Process | Integrated Community Development
Overview
Living in Community is an innovative and unique community development project involving groups that have traditionally been in conflict. The project aims to bring diverse groups together to facilitate dialogue and increase understanding among sex workers, community organizations, business groups, residents and government.
Although building consensus and effective group dialogue can be challenging, especially when groups come from such diverse perspectives, these differences greatly enhance the discussions. Recognizing different cultural values, world views and experiences without judgment is a starting place for fostering greater understanding of these differences and for understanding shared experiences that exist despite the differences.
Community Engagement Process
In the fall/winter of 2006-2007 Living in Community held an extensive community engagement process that included neighbourhood-based dialogues, focus groups and interviews. This community consultation process provided feedback on the Living in Community Draft Action Plan that has been developed based on research and initial public consultations. Through the community consultation process, Living in Community has developed a final Action Plan to create healthier and safer communities, to be implemented by individuals, communities, community groups and organizations, and governments.
We based our approach to the community engagement process based on the following principles:
• Working from a rights-based perspective.
• Recognizing the role of individuals, communities and systems in all processes of change.
• Making space for building relationships.
• Cultivating trust between participants.
• Acknowledging the role of world views and value systems in a truly community-directed approach to development.
• A participatory, empowerment model that operates from the bottom-up, ensuring active and meaningful involvement of those who are most deeply affected by the issues.
The top concerns expressed in the Community Engagement Process included:
• Sexual exploitation and recruitment of children & youth
• Visible sex industry needs to be moved from neighbourhoods
• Violence against and marginalization of sex workers
• Dirty needles/condoms in neighbourhoods & playgrounds
• Poverty, homelessness, addiction, mental health issues
• Personal safety for residents, sex workers, employees
• Residents being mistaken for sex workers
• Stigmatization & taboos around sex work
• Health and safety of indoor workers
• Need for enforcement against sex work customers
All of the dialogues held in neighbourhoods with visible street sex work, shared concerns around the visual impact, drugs, health and safety and garbage such as used condoms, needles latex gloves etc. They also had a higher concern around personal safety and about how to talk and explain to their children about sex workers in the neighbourhood.
In general, the vast majority of the focus of the discussions was on women sex workers who work on the streets, as well as on sexually exploited children and youth. Male and transgendered sex workers were mentioned infrequently, though there are many male and transgendered sex workers in Vancouver.
Based on information from the community engagement process and extensive research, the Living in Community Action Plan focuses on increasing health and safety for all community members in relation to the effects of sex work.
The Living in Community Action Plan attempts to take into account how change occurs at individual, community, and societal levels, while balancing human rights, harm reduction, and prevention.
Living in Community's recommendations provide strategies in five areas:
• Community development
• Prevention/education
• Intervention/harm reduction
• Exiting from sex work
• Legal responses
Despite horrifying evidence related to Vancouver's 67 missing women, it appears that no government-federal, provincial, or municipal-has had sufficient desire or ability to take action. The Living In Community committee is resolute in its belief that our society must work together to address this issue.
Living in Community Action Plan
Integrated community development
Integrated community development takes into account both the inner and outer components of community. The outer components, such as social systems, the physical environment and community culture all contribute to the building of healthy communities. It also important to consider the interior parts of society that inform our opinions and decision-making, including values, needs, worldviews and motivations.
Integrated community development understands that social change comes about through a combination of individual and collective action. Personal growth, individual action and self-development are interwoven with working collaboratively and developing a common vision for healthy and safe communities. This means that there is a role for individuals, communities and governments in working to develop healthy communities that contribute to the health, well-being and human development of all individuals.
Each level brings with it different needs, different perspectives and possibilities for change. If only the role of government is taken into account, the role of communities in working towards social change will be missed. Likewise, if the focus is solely on the role of individual sex workers in creating problems, the roles of poverty, mental illness and addictions may be overlooked. Worldviews and values also influence the ways that individuals act, and the way that collective change takes place.
The following diagram is a way of thinking about integrated community development at the individual, collective and systemic levels that is based on human rights principles.
