Community Learning
Speak One Voice believes meaningful change begins when people are given the opportunity to learn, reflect, question harmful norms and act together.
What it is
Our community learning approach creates opportunities for women, youth, faith leaders and community members to examine how religion, culture and social practices can influence relationships and violence.
Who leads the change
Women are central to Speak One Voice’s approach. Women often play important roles in families, churches and communities and can influence attitudes, behaviors and cultural practices.
Speak One Voice works with faith leaders because churches and religious communities have an important role in shaping values, relationships and community responses to violence.
The process
Facilitators carry a group through four steps. Each moves from experience towards a plan the group has made for itself.
The learners are assigned a task that makes them engage with a concrete experience.
Learners reflect on the experience, taking note of the observations and reactions in the task.
This process allows learners to identify new learning and link it to real life situations.
Next steps. Learners make plans of how to apply the acquired knowledge to actual situations.
The cycle is continuous: planning leads back into doing, and the group works through it again.
Why reflection
Speak One Voice uses experiential learning and self-reflection to help women and church leaders examine beliefs, behaviors and practices surrounding violence against women and children. The intended change is not simply increased knowledge.
Changed understanding
Changed behavior
Stronger relationships
Safer communities
The content
Five subjects, worked through by the group rather than presented to it.
How faith and cultural beliefs shape attitudes, relationships and the way violence is understood, worked through in dialogue rather than taught.
Understanding violence against women and girls, and the structures and beliefs that allow it to continue.
Healthy parenting, keeping children safe, and the effect of violence in the home on the whole family.
What support already exists in a community and where the gaps are, including what makes a church or a home a safe space.
What trauma is and how it travels through a community, and how speaking about violence begins to break the cycle.
Facilitators are trained to lead these conversations and work from a toolkit developed by Speak One Voice. See where the work has reached.
Speak One Voice trains facilitators to lead this process where they live and worship.
