QUICK LINKS
Be Empathetic and Compassionate | Understand Who to Engage | Avoid a One Size Fits All Approach
Focus on Community Identified Priorities | Ensure Community Facilitators Have Appropriate Core Competencies
Build Networks and Structures of Support | Promote Sustainability
Embed Opportunities for Learning and Reflection | Evoke Peoples Own Reasons For Change
Ensure the Safety and Security of Project Stakeholders
In addition to the key concepts and shared core values and principles underpinning best practices in community engagement and development already outlined, the following additional recommendations are provided based on lessons learned within the field of community engagement and development, and community-based animal welfare improvement projects. It is recommended that these be used to inform the design and implementation of any CE and CD process to mitigate common pitfalls which can undermine the effectiveness of these processes and related achievement of animal welfare improvement goals.
Be Empathetic and Compassionate
Empathy involves viewing things other’s perspective and being understanding of their experiences and feelings, with your primary feelings more related to the other person’s situation than your own experience of it [58]. It makes people feel heard and understood which makes people more likely to make change, as well as helps in building connection and rapport [58]. Compassion refers to the desire to help/support, which can build on empathy by taking into consideration the understanding of others’ experiences and feelings and tailoring the desire to support in accordance with what the other person expresses they need. Being empathetic may not always be easy when people are engaging in behaviours that are causing harm to animals, however your relationship with community members and ability to support them in making desired changes can be improved by engaging in the following ways:
- Feel and express/reflect genuine care and concern: be empathetic to people’s circumstance and feelings by communicating your own understanding of what they’re feeling and experiencing (e.g. it’s a challenging time for you and you’re not alone, I understand you’ve experienced a lot and it’s not been easy for you), as opposed to expressing sympathy which expresses understanding from your own perspective (e.g. expressing pity) [58].
- Be non-judgemental: if you notice yourself judging someone, remember that people have their own good reasons for feeling and acting in the ways they do, and that their behaviours are the result of their capability, motivation and opportunities [20, 21, 58]. Focus on understanding their rationale and situation, rather than judging their results.
- Your role is to motivate and facilitate people in changing their behaviours, however it is community members who ultimately decide whether they will take action to change, and it is essential to respect their autonomy to do so [20, 58].
Understand Who to Engage
When deciding whose participation to target and how, it is important to identify whose animals are most vulnerable to poor welfare, and which individuals’ can affect change in the welfare status of animals [20, 21]. Individuals’ related ability to influence their animals’ welfare are likely to be influenced by their social identities and associated roles and responsibilities [50]. However, in identifying who to engage and whose behaviour to target for change, it is important to ensure the project is not operating in a gender blind or exploitative way or legitimizing or exacerbating biases, discrimination and inequalities experienced by marginalized groups [33, 37, 42]. Adoption of strategies to address inequitable distribution of roles, responsibilities, decision making power, and influence may therefore need to be considered to achieve optimal outcomes for animal welfare, as well as greater equality and equity in opportunities and access to resources important to supporting animals’ welfare [50, 49].
Avoid a One Size Fits All Approach
Evidence suggests a one size fits all approach does not suit all, and that organising approaches that combine methods of engagement are likely to be more effective in promoting inclusivity and diversity and better support achievement of desired outcomes [46]. In addition, seek to understand the intersecting issues which may constrain different community members’ participation, and capabilities, motivation and opportunities to positively contribute to their animals’ welfare, as these are likely to vary widely depending on individuals and groups’ attributes and personal circumstances [21]. The local context and project resources must also be taken into consideration when determining the most appropriate and feasible approaches for working with communities to change behaviours to improve animal welfare.
Focus on Community Identified Priorities
Supporting priorities identified by the community helps promote community participation and ownership over desired outcomes, and ensures outcomes are relevant and meaningful to communities [61, 37, 59, 42]. Use participatory approaches to support bottom up identification of community’s priority needs or issues of concern to work on [37, 38, 42]. If a project has priority issues or outcomes it is interested in supporting, ensure that the project agenda is similarly prioritized by communities. If your agenda is not well aligned with that of the community, you may wish to reconsider whether it is ethical and necessary to proceed in working with communities to achieve it, or alternatively you may need to do some additional ground work to generate greater understanding and unlock their interest and motivation to adopt your priority agenda items as their own.
Ensure Community Facilitators Have Appropriate Core Competencies
Working with communities to facilitate behaviour change required specialized skills, and effective facilitation can make the difference between productive and non-productive CE and CD processes, and significantly influence community participation as well as the success of animal welfare intervention projects [46, 38, 42]. Engagement with communities can often go awry due to bad facilitation, poor communication skills, poorly managed confrontational dynamics, shallow exchanges, and the invisible barriers erected by perceived expertise [46]. In addition, CE and CD processes can reproduce existing inequalities unless they are designed and facilitated to distribute influence by ensuring diversity and inclusion [46, 50, 37]. It is therefore recommended community facilitators and community change agents have sufficient core competencies to undertake their roles and responsibilities in an ethical, effective, and participatory manor, and are provided necessary training and support to undertake their responsibilities as needed [50, 38, 42].
Build Networks and Structures of Support
Build Networks and Structures of Support: Individuals can only adopt and sustain desired changes when they have an enabling environment to do so [41, 21]. It can be helpful to facilitate social networks amongst target peer groups, and encourage them to provide support and encouragement to each other where they have shared interests in achieving positive change [65, 63]. Building opportunities for enhanced peer support and positive role modelling can also increase the willingness of others to try the new behaviours, as well as further motivate them to sustain it [66, 31, 63]. Similarly, it may be necessary to support creating or strengthening enabling systems or structures to ensure they can fulfil their duties and meet the needs of communities and their animals [20, 21, 38, 42]. In concert, linking communities with key actors within these systems and generating understanding and relationships between different these different stakeholders can be helpful to improving the delivery of resources and services necessary to supporting animal welfare [20]. For example, ensuring animal health service providers have relevant knowledge, skills, and resources available to provide quality and affordable animal health services to communities, and organizing meetings to introduce key actors to communities and generate demand for services has proven an effective strategy for supporting communities’ service seeking behaviour within Brooke’s animal welfare programmes [67]. In addition, by strengthening the social networks within animal owning communities, communities within Brooke project areas in India have been able to coordinate their collective seeking of preventative animal vaccines and bulk purchases of quality animal feed, thereby reducing costs for community members and increasing animal service and resource providers’ responsiveness to these communities’ needs.
Promote Sustainability [59]
Promoting sustainability refers to ensuring that project outcomes and desired positive changes can be maintained beyond the timescale of the project. Achieving lasting change is supported by ensuring communities have the capacity, opportunity and motivation to independently sustain animal welfare improvements upon withdrawal of support and project exit [21, 20]. By understanding the drivers of behaviour and barriers to change from the perspective of those who are targeted to adopt such changes, and empowering communities to overcome them themselves, lasting change is more likely to be achieved [21, 20, 67]. It is therefore important that interventions implemented do not promote community members’ dependency on external support in order to for them to sustain desired positive change. Focusing on solutions which harness and strengthen local knowledge, skills, and resources is more likely to lead to lasting change [20, 38, 37, 41, 42, 61]. For example, after years of providing free animal health clinics, The Brooke observed this strategy had unintended consequences of undermining existing animal health service providers’ delivery of services, and decreased people’s willingness to invest in these services themselves. As a result, there was poor maintenance of service seeking behaviours when free animal health services were no longer provided upon project exit. In addition, promoting community ownership over issues, solutions and outcomes improves the sustainability of change, as does relying on local knowledge, skills, and strengths to the greatest extent feasible [61, 42].
Embed Opportunities for Learning and Reflection
Experiential learning that involves opportunities for reflective evaluation of not only what has and has not been achieved, but also how these outcomes resulted support learning, generate motivation to take action or sustain change, and foster a greater sense of ownership over results [41, 65]. Participatory learning and action methods and tools can be particularly useful to generating discussions that promote learning and reflection, and can be helpful to supporting people’s progress through the stages of change [68, 42, 67]. In addition, providing opportunities for participants to demonstrate their acquired understanding or skills, and feedback on their learning experience can help further embed learnings and enable adaptation of communications and trainings as needed [42]. Using a variety of verbal, visual and practical hands-on learning exercises is also recommended to accommodate the variety of ways people learn, incorporating as much experiential learning as possible. Delivering learnings through one-way communication, in which information is shared without feedback or discussion with participants, is least effective and should always be avoided [42].
Evoke Peoples Own Reasons For Change
Telling people what the problem is and what they need to do is the least effective way to support them in making desired changes. Instead of telling individuals what to do, seek to invoke community members’ own motivation and resources for change.
- Trust that individuals are motivated for something, even if it is not what you want them to do.
- Avoid acting as the expert and advising on what others should be doing. It’s natural to want to help fix problems for people, however this doesn’t help them own the process or results.
- Respect community members as experts in their own lives. Seek to understand their experiences and rationales for current behaviours, evoke their own reasons for change, and support them in identifying their own solutions.
- Only provide your expertise as needed to mitigate potential unintended consequences of their solutions on animals, people, or the environment, and ask before offering ideas or advice when they are unable to solution issues themselves.
Ensure the Safety and Security of Project Stakeholders
Ensure the Safety and Security of Project Stakeholders: Put safeguarding policies and standard operating procedures in place to mitigate potential harm to stakeholders that may result from engaging in animal welfare improvement projects. Ensure such projects create a safe and secure enabling environment for potentially discriminated and vulnerable groups to participate, as well as for project workers to implement their roles and responsibilities without putting themselves, animals, the environment or others at risk [42].