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T30 Community Animal Welfare Visioning
T30: Community Animal Welfare Visioning
Community visioning tools aid animal owning community members in brainstorming and agreeing on what they desire to achieve in the future within their community. Through a facilitated series of meetings, workshops, surveys, and growth-scenario comparisons, the animal owning community members can create a community vision—a written statement that reflects the community’s goals and priorities and describes how the community should look and feel in years to come with regards to how they treat their working animals.
| Tool purpose: | Time needed: |
| • To generate ideas from the community on how the future should look like for them, with regards to working animals’ welfare. • To cultivate a sense of community ownership and buy-in on a shared animal welfare vision for future actions, decisions and regulations around animal welfare in a community. | 2.5 - 3 hours |
| Materials needed: | |
| Cards, pens, markers, coloured powder, chalk, sticks, tree leaves, coloured cards, or other locally available materials. |
Keyword Search Tags
Project Phase:
Initiation Phase, Planning Phase
Approaches for Working With Communities: Community Development Approach, Community Engagement Approach
Behavioural Drivers (COM-B):
Motivation
Stages of Behaviour Change:
Preparation Stage
Project Support: Participatory Learning and Action Tools
Specific Topics: Group Formation/Strengthening, Community Change Agent
| Community animal welfare visioning | |
|---|---|
| Step 1 | Before embarking on a community visioning process, it is crucial to define the geographic boundary of the community and the key stakeholders who are relevant to improving animals’ welfare within the community including those who may be impacted by or influence the project and decisions made by animal owning community members/community group or their ability to improve their animal’s welfare. It is critically important to ensure the inclusion of people who are marginalised for various reasons (e.g. gender, disability, socio-economic status, etc.) and acknowledge the different lived experiences of animal owning communities and ensure their participation through the processes to be used, the discussions and decisions to be made. It is equally important to create an understanding why community animal welfare visioning needs to be done. |
| Step 2 | After defining the geographic community, the next step is to form a vision committee. The committee should include representatives from the animal owning community members, animal health and resource providers, local government extension agents among others to ensure diverse and inclusive representation as well as participation of men, women, and animal owning community members facing marginalization. This committee or a similar nature can further be maintained in the future as a sounding board for the programme/project implementation area; and membership can be rotated. The aim of establishing the committee is to have a representative body and point of contact for the project who can help encourage community participation, organize, and lead meetings, and draft actions that would put the community towards realizing their animal welfare agenda. The wider community can be facilitated to vote for members to serve in the committee from the different groups that need representation. There can be a quota or reserving of seats/spaces to such committee membership roles to ensure representation of diverse community members. See 1 Gender Mainstreaming Checklist for ideas to consider and create a safe space for participants to share their views]. Along with ensuring inclusivity and diversity of animal owning communities, it is important to craft clear questions that will inspire communities and stakeholders what the future could be for themselves and their animals’ welfare including exploring the resources they have to support their animals’ welfare improvement. See 4 on Guidance on Facilitating Conversations for Change. Some illustrative open questions that can be asked are • Why are working animals important to you and your families/communities? Why do you care about your animals’ welfare? • What do you wish to see happen after 10 years in your community regarding working animals’ welfare, animal owning communities and related services? What would make your locality a better place for working animals and their owners? What has worked well and how? Who are the key people/stakeholders or resources making it work? • What opportunities currently exist in your locality to help you realize those visions come to life? What do you think will make the greater animal welfare improvement in your locality? How can you create change to realize the vision? What opportunities do you see? When facilitating such discussions, it is important to actively listen (3 Guidance on Listening to Change Talks) to help you bring the positive forward looking aspirations and the change talks from the animal owners, service providers and local government agents who partake in the committee initial conversations. |
| Step 3 | The next step involves facilitating a visioning process where community members develop a vision of their equine/working animals’ welfare in their community as they imagine 10 years into the future. This process can be made through a series of community meetings if the geographic scope is wider or if separate sessions are required to create an enabling safe space. The idea is to freely vision what communities wish to see happen 10 years into the future that will enable both the community and animals to enjoy a better/good life. To probe into this, ask the community to identify their strengths, opportunities, aspirations (e.g., what the community is deeply passionate about), and desired results in relation to meeting their animals' welfare and their animal husbandry and management practices. Once results have been identified, then ask community participants to identify impacts of achieving these results, building different scenarios for both the animal owning community as well as their animals. Examples of potential result scenarios could include allocation of a certain number of water points, expansion of grazing area land, availability of animal feed throughout the year etc. Once all ideas are compiled as the group starts to develop distinct results visions taking into consideration the community’s identified strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results, and impact. Explain these will then be shared in a public meeting with the broader animal owning community to gain broader community agreement on a preferred vision for animal welfare for their community. Note that this is not about the majority’s views but also valuing the visions of minorities by valuing diversity and their different lived experiences. If holding a series of community meetings is not possible, the other option is to use the identified diverse and inclusive steering committee to do the visioning exercise and bring it to the wider group for consultation(stated in Step. 5) and validation after undertaking step 4. |
| Step 4 | Next step is to take inventory of the resources in the community. Then identify among the list of the resources, which ones are important to supporting animal welfare, such as veterinary services, land for grazing or animal feed production, water points, shelter for animals, animal resource providers such as feed and equipment sellers for the identified vision. The vision steering committee will play the role of documenting the community discussions and promote participation of all actors, so that everyone’s voice is heard, and their views captured. This discussion should strive to encourage community members to list resources they like, dislike, or want to change, as well as resources the community lacks. They could also identify areas for potential development. Once created, the community can then vote on the list to rank the priorities, choosing the top 3 priorities to focus on. The community can use 1- 3 dots to vote on the top 3 priorities. The inventory serves as the basis for discussion about animal welfare improvement priorities and provides a framework for which the vision committee can track progress, report to the bigger community, and support the community with taking on board the next priorities (after addressing the first priorities). While best accomplished through a community meeting, generating an inventory of resources important to meeting animals’ welfare needs can also be informed by surveys and/or key informant interviews, or outputs of other tools such as Community Mapping (T1), Venn Diagram (T3), Matrix Ranking and Scoring (T9), and ‘If I Were an Animal’ (T17). |
| Step 5 | Convene a public workshop including the broader animal owning community where the steering committee will present different scenarios of potential visions for animal welfare in 10 years within their community that are collected from the different community group discussions. In discussing these different visions, it is helpful to share the rationale for how they came to be – e.g., what community strengths and opportunities could be harnessed, which community aspirations they speak to, and results and impacts they are likely to achieve, to gives community members the opportunity to choose a preferred scenario. Graphical representation of the scenarios is helpful where feasible to develop and provide. Once presented, ask community participants to select their preferred vision for animal welfare, for which the steering committee will then draft a community vision statement that identifies and explains specific community goals and expands upon how the preferred scenario satisfies those goals. If there are some modifications required, it is good to facilitate the discussion to ensure a buy-in by all. Good to note that this is not about the majority's views but also valuing the visions of minorities by valuing diversity and their different lived experiences. The statement should also include a description of the existing animal welfare situation, as well as details about how the visioning process unfolded. The vision statement should be broad in scope and clear in vision. This needs to be written as well as read out loud considering the different needs of participants (catering to illiterate or people with different disabilities). The steering committee should present the draft statement to the community for review; after comments and feedback are incorporated, then it will be adopted as the community vision. Ideally, other key institutions within the community such as school and business associations will also adopt the statement, helping ensure that all major community entities follow the same guidelines when making animal welfare decisions. |
| Step 6 | The visioning process and vision statement allow a community to clearly articulate its values—however, without proper implementation, they are generally ineffective. Once developed, the vision statement can then be used to identify members of the community who are interested in working to improve their animal’s welfare in accordance with the vision, serving as a basis for community group formation around this shared vision and for working with the project to take collective action to achieve their vision. In addition, it can inform discussions, planning future next steps and identification of potential stakeholders that need to be engaged to support realization of the visions e.g., non-profits, business associations, and other key entities (e.g. veterinary service providers). Document key insights and interest to engage with the project within the Project Action Tracker to help inform project planning. |
Facilitation Notes
- A steering committee should represent a diverse range of stakeholder groups from all segments of the community to help keep the committee accountable to the community, ensures that no voices are left out of the visioning process as this boosts community participation and buy-in.
- Encourage aspiration, communication and open sharing; the participants should not go into the visioning process with a defined outcome.
- Community participation is critical for a successful visioning process; after all, the goal of the process is to create a vision that reflects the priorities and concerns of people in the community, and that cannot happen if they do not speak up.
- As the community visioning discussion might become more than animal welfare, facilitator needs to refocus the discussion on animal welfare.
- Following this tool Community Animal Welfare Action Planning (T34) can be used.
Tool adapted from [88]