Community Innovation

Project

Marginalised communities are often at the frontlines of society’s most pressing challenges – including humanitarian crises. We partnered with ELRHA to train 3 of their local humanitarian innovation partners (ASECSA, Centre for Disaster Preparedness and YAKKUM Emergency Unit) so that they could build their own community reporter networks and uncover insights that can be embedded into their work.

Across Guatemala, Indonesia and the Philippines, they have begun to dig deeper into their communities, creating a space to amplify their concerns and local, inclusive solutions.

Process

Across 5 months, Radar worked closely with ELRHA and their local innovation partners to build their knowledge, capacity and confidence around community reporting – taking them through the history as well as the steps to establishing their own networks.

As part of this, we developed a bespoke and fully accessible online learning platform where each partner could take part in a 4-week self-paced training course. This included 4 modules, 10 step-by-step guides and 7 case studies all translated into Spanish, as well as weekly mentoring over chat apps and email to share prompts and answer questions.

To support the partners as they began to put their new skills into practice, we created Co-Prduction recipe cards. From one hour to one month, they set out the activities each team could use to generate stories and identify themes with their communities around disaster preparedness and humanitarian innovation.

Impact

Now, each partner has undertaken an activity with their community (including Rapid 8 workshops, interviews and storyboarding) and uncovered insights and ideas that can be embedded into their work (eg for advocacy, design or research).

Just from this short time together, they have created a space for genuine conversation and ideas from the communities they represent – including ideas around an inclusive village information system, climate adaptive farming, and amplifying experiences of women and people with disabilities in innovation. 

Partners

ELRHA and their humanitarian innovation partners including YAKKUM Emergency Unit (Philippines), ASECSA (Guatemala) and the Centre for Disaster Preparedness (Indonesia).

Links

Check out Radars training and tools in our Resource Hub