Inroads to formal organizations
Opening Vollies
Q: Why is you’re doing community work would you go through a “formal institution?”
Q: How do we get more people to help who are already in the institutions? They house the resources.
The large institutions have mandates and resources. This presents a challenge for playing nicely. New things coming into the ecosystem mean giving up power and money. How do we break that model?
Community Participation
Challenge: Disjoint / lack of relationships between the communities and the institutions.
Q: How might civilians affect policy-making?
For example: There are civilian groups doing who who might design valuable policy - to address ebola, for example - who do not have access to the people within institutions who can implement. One researcher, an anthropologist, discovered that changing burial practices could dramatically reduce ebola outbreak. It ended up being one of the most significant advances in policy and helping the crisis.
Q: What are the possible mechanisms for this sort of exchange between institutions and civilians?
Good Examples:
There is often a disjoint between what is said and what is done, for example: The World Humanitarian Summit consultations went well (“you should do this”). But the results of the conversations were miscommunicated, resulting in problems and ambiguities in the actual final outcomes.