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Community Practice Skills: Local to Global Perspectives resources

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8 ■ COMMUNITY PRACTICE: PURPOSE AND KNOWLEDGE BASE KENYA CHILE For the past thirty years, all over Kenya, For fi fty years, and under widely diver- Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 gent national governments, residents of Nobel Peace Prize, has provided leader- La Victoria, a poor neighborhood on ship to the Green Belt Movement with the edge of Santiago, Chile, have strug- the aim “to mobilize communities for gled to fi nd meaning and justice in self- determination, justice, equity, pov- their lives. Even during the dark years of erty reduction, and environmental con- the Pinochet regime with its concen- servation, using trees as the entry point” trated military effort to crush any pop u- (Green Belt Movement 2006). The Green lar movement, ordinary citizens contin- Belt Movement has or ga nized numerous ued to or ga nize and to break down the community networks that are now car- fear created by the military. For exam- ing for 6,000 tree nurseries across Kenya. ple, during the Pinochet years, the people These community networks have already of La Victoria or ga nized a huge outdoor planted more than 30 million trees tea on March 8 to mark International throughout Kenya, transforming not Women’s Day. The women of La Victo- only the environment but also attitudes ria were seated at tables that stretched about the future and thoughts of how to down the entire street, while the town’s shape it. Currently, the Green Belt men and children served the tea and Movement has projects that move be- snacks that they had cooked in church yond Kenya’s borders and that are con- kitchens. The people of La Victoria tinuing the mission of working with ordi- seized this and every other opportunity nary people to improve their lives and to have a public celebration, and in so future, using tree planting as the moti- doing, they “reclaimed symbolic power vational beginning point for community as they rejected the regime’s imposed development and citizen involve ment. reality,” thereby creating “spaces of pos- sibility and re sis tance in the face of pow- erfully determining forces.” (Finn 2005:22) fi built capital, which is composed of all ve building blocks, is what Hart calls the things humans make and produce (e.g., buildings, equipment, information, infrastructure, art, music, clothing, roads). Hart’s picture of community capital helps us understand the relationships between the resources available to com- munity members and the way our communities can strengthen or preserve those resources. COMMUNITY PRACTICE EXAMPLES How do we engage with a community, in either a local or a global context, to work toward community improvement? Each of the boxed examples in this chapter provides a brief description of community from the perspective of

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