How We Work Together

Community involvement, education and empowerment are the keys to the journey out of poverty. This Life Cambodia strives to encompass all of these elements in all of the work we do. One of the most critical steps to achieving developmental goals is for the solutions to community issues to come from communities themselves. This Life Cambodia facilitates this process, offering technical advice and direction to help communities to develop the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty.

Our educational and development programs are backed by experience and our research is thorough and constructive. We believe in creating future realties for a Cambodia free of poverty, founded on experience and community-level capacity, social justice and human rights frameworks. In this respect we are innovative and creative. We have adopted the “Think Globally, Act Locally” mantra for all our projects.

A central component of community involvement is the identification and mobilisation of support committees. In order to become sustainable we have initiated the following sustainable development model, which is adapted for each project we undertake:

The ultimate goal of all our development projects is to work with the community and to build capacity for long-term, sustainable self-sufficiency. In doing so our approach improves the ability of communities to respond to their own development needs. The implementation process is designed to provide for community engagement, ownership, capacity building and mobilisation at all stages.

Key areas of community involvement in the development process are

  1. Participatory Rural Appraisals (the starting point of community involvement and ownership)
  2. Contribution to construction (financial, resources or labour)
  3. Involvement in construction bidding process, construction, and construction monitoring
  4. Improving the centres environment (cleaning, painting, maintenance, gardens, trees, etc)
  5. Selecting and organising programs
  6. Student Associations or “Youth Clubs”
  7. Awareness of importance and benefits of education, as well as basic rights (advocacy)
  8. Key actors promoting value of education within the community
  9. Community monitoring/reporting

Community Development Workshops promote sustainability, community ownership and accountability, as well as monitoring key indicators to ensure the development project is a success.