Not Just Song & Games:

A People-Centric Approach to Communication

To educate and initiate dialogue in a community, the use of traditional forms such as theatre, song and games, has truly stood the test of time. If an organisation wants to engage with the community it serves, it needs to understand how people articulate their problems and move to resolve them. Theatre is still very much in use:  to educate the public, to pose questions and initiate a discussion, or to engage individuals to demonstrate the problems they face.

A recent South India Workshop on Popular Education and Communication, held from  2 – 5 March 2011 in Bangalore, was led by Parishkaran. Parishkaran, established in 2009, focuses on building the capacities of communities and institutions for good governance. It aims to facilitate people’s engagement with the governance process, and assists them in building and developing platforms and tools to this end. Parishkaran regularly conducts workshops with organisations across South Asia, on how to bring in the community’s dialogue and interests to the forefront of any effort to advocate.

At the South India workshop, Parishkaran sought to build the skills of organisations to use popular education and communication. Here, popular refers to ‘people-centric’ as a method for organisations to advocate for their community of interest. Participants were taught how to employ theatre techniques, use games, songs and even pictures or photos, to initiate dialogue and participation from the communities with which they work.

The objectives of this workshop were:

-       to share, understand and identify current methodologies used

-       to understand Popular Education/ Communication

-       to explore its use in current work

-       to equip individuals with Popular education /Communication tools for community organising and education

-       to develop skills on creatively packaging one’s work for community mobilisation and advocacy

Organisations that participated in the workshop were put through an intense experience, cut off from the rest of the world for four days, with sessions, activities and discussions from 9 in the morning to 10 at night. All the participants quickly found they could relate the method to their field, whether it was working with people with disabilities, HIV or Dalit rights.

Exploring these traditional skills of popular education and communication was not all that was on offer. Parishkaran was partnered at the workshop by Mahiti. Mahiti runs a project Convene, that conducts workshops for voluntary organisations and groups on the use of open source tools and internet media to strengthen their visibility and reach in society. Convene conducted sessions and activities on using simple free and open source tools to create audio-visual material, and on the use of social media for campaigning and advocacy. The use of these technical tools was absolutely new for these organisations but they were quick to learn how the use of these tools took their communication and education efforts to a larger level of public engagement.

Mahiti and Parishkaran will partner again for a National Level Workshop to be held in June 2011, on the similar lines of teaching traditional skills like theatre, songs, games, and photos for community mobilisation with open source tools for creating print, audio-visual material and new media tools for advocacy.