RACD philosophy and approach

RADC is working directly with poor and disadvantages communities and sustain organizations and institution whom work with them. Our association promotes and sustains community facilitation (community organizing) as the main way to rich the community, to transfer the abilities and knowledge need to become an open society, decentralized with horizontal relations and mutual respect. Community facilitation is for us the way to build social capital by assisting communities and by increasing the flow of resources to the community.

Our main characteristic is the special attention to the grass root approach, participatory and positive techniques in order to facilitate the raise of sustainable and effective community based organizations. We are using these techniques because we believe that the experiential learning is the best way to reach our objectives.

Expanding community participation, on issues important to them, is a valuable tool to ensure the economic and social sustainability of projects and to build social capital, strengthening the organizational and institutional capacities. In our work we are trying to support and build on communities' existing capacities to organize themselves in order to increase civic engagement and to strengthen civil society.

We believe that a sustainable community development program should be oriented also to the community leadership development because, building communities mean also to increase the capacity and effectiveness of indigenous leaders to rebuild and sustain communities, and to develop leadership styles emphasizing collaboration and inclusion.

Based on our experience, a community is developed and a civil society is strong when:

• Community members care about community welfare (a strong local identity);
• Community members has a shared vision of their community,
• Community members fell responsible for their community;
• Community members fell capable to address community issues (self trust);
• Community members trust themselves and trust others other (trusting others);

These are the values that make people to feel the ownership, to initiate actions and to cooperate in covering the community needs. These are the values that give a sustainable development of any community, these are the values that define a culture of pragmatic cooperation at community level.

Long term strategic directions:

ARDC will fulfill it's mission by working in two long term strategic directions:

Working

• Working directly at community level on a long term basis in order to assist and support the creation of effective community based organizing (formal or informal) aiming to improve the community life.
• Promoting community development approach at national and regional level with focus on increasing the interest and capacities of other developmental organizations (NGOs, donors, public institutions…) to promot community development programs.