Young Socheat of Cambodia shares his tale of community organising

Hope you all are doing well with life and CO works. Here are some updates from Cambodia:

1. Our lives are busy and crazy as usual. Mr. Sivutha is still the champion of being the busiest man, traveling to the provinces for CO works.

2. We, participants of advance CO course 2009, Mr. Sivutha, Nareth and Socheat are working together with other activist NGOs organizing quarterly CO Study Circle.

3. Nareth and I together with few activist NGOs in cooperation with LOCOA (Leaders and Organizers on CO in Asia); some of you may know LOCOA is developing CO ToT training curriculum for fit Cambodia context.

4. I as Program Officer-CO for SADP (Southeast Asia Development Program) am practicing Quality Process Approach on Community Organizing with local NGO partners at the fields so that during this month I will be at the field together with our NGO partners doing community reflection and planning at 6 target villages. The reflection will be once in 4 months and the following months will be supporting and following up the community plans. As we are trying to build ownership of the community, the plan will be mostly carry out by the communities themselves.

More updates are coming soon either from my side and Narath+Mr. Sivutha

Good luck
socheat.

Cambodia CO Touching Many Lives
The following report is from Hem Nareth, a young and dynamic organiser who has undergone SEAPCP Comunity Organising training course in 2008 and 2009.




Here is my latest achievement of providing CO training to young people who living in slums as well as some staff of Village Earth organisation in Cambodia. I am trying to build inside and out side community organisers and now after the trainings, I have 4 more main steps for them:

1. Practice analysing their own community problems sharply
2 Document these in writing.
3. Start to organize community through existing programs such as medical care (in eviction problems and also use income generation as entry points as well).
4. Monitoring and Evaluation of their own organizing work.

After they have finished the 4 main steps, they could achieve the real experience in organizing and they will also get their certificates. (This course will take about 1 years).

Every 2 weeks, I meet them ( those trained participants) for about 2 hours to consult or assist them when they faced problems or challenges. I also integrated CO session in sustainable development curriculum, it's quite a successful workshop.

Now I am organizing the youngster ( at risk youth) by using music class as entry point. It's quite challenging, they get passionate very fast, and also lose interests very fast as well. That's so hard for me to monitor and motivate them so often!

Will update u later about that improvement, take care everybody,

Hem Nareth

PAKISTAN ORGANISING PUSHES ON!



The following is a brief report from one of our SEAPCP Community Organising Network members Hassan of Pakistan.
Dear all CO's,

Thanks for sharing the interesting training report and thoughts on various CO efforts in your own areas. I am resending the report on the CO training I organized and conducted here in Pakistan. I had shared some photos but the detailed report (available upon request) is attached with this mail. Please do see page 12 on which pre and post training evaluation is given. it was indeed a great success which could be judged from this statement of a participant, Ayaz Abro, from training "i have been working in development sector for over ten years, and in this time attended many trainings, including some on CO, but this training is so the best".



On other fronts, we have organized two youth groups in two districts of Pakistan. The youth groups have been training in using "Puppetry Theater". They would use Puppetry Theater for improving interfaith harmony among Muslims and Non-Muslims in Pakistan. The initiative is similar to one in Cambodia. The focus there is on HIV/AIDS but in our case it's for Interfaith Harmony.

Regards,
Hassan