IDare believes in positive community change behavior (or sometimes, if we identify a positive behavior, then it is better to be sustained) in order to achieve long-term and tangible impact. Adopting the approach of positive community change behavior is relatively new when it comes to the development sector as it is being used heavily in health and environment domains.
In a number of situations in the development sector when dealing with behavioral goals related to preventing or stopping online hate speech behavior, or outlining an intervention mix that would prevent violent extremism, or mainstreaming a peaceful behavior, challenges vary between lack of baseline numbers, reliable research, and context relevancy.
Part of our approach relies on having an informative scoping phase of action research that is well investigating the issue under study and goes deeper into identifying the relevant social norms.
IDare pays close attention to the right holders we work with and therefore, having a human-centered design is a crucial step towards ensuring that we are starting from having a proper understanding of the right holders we work with, we are able to grasp their needs and with using creative approaches towards addressing those needs and providing innovative solutions that would speak to them.
IDare team together with the youth, we invested in the whole of 2018 using a human-centered design process towards identifying IDare’s 15 competency model that would make a young person more resilient. IDare competency model is integrated into our programs where youth will have the chance to work on developing or acquiring one or more of these competencies through approaching three dimensions: knowledge, skills, and attitudes for each competency.
Positive Youth Development (PYD) through IDare’s 15 competencies model which are; communication, sharing knowledge, teamwork, sense of initiative, sense of responsibility, open-mindedness, self-awareness, critical thinking, learning to learn, creativity, inner readiness, intellectual autonomy, empathy, self-confidence, and adaptation to change.
If we visualise the DNA helix which is composed of two strands, IDare considers the youth is one strand of the DNA and IDare is the second strand. Both strands are necessary to form the DNA. IDare work hand in hand with the youth through:
Part of IDare work is to provide spaces, means, and facilitators for the knowledge and learning aspects. For that, IDare designs its own pedagogy and training kits based on non-formal learning methodologies. IDare delivers its capacity building through; residential training camps, workshops, and learning sessions.
After equipping the right holders with knowledge and learning, then they will be ready to move into the creation part where the youth are expected and encouraged to design and implement their own youth-led initiatives that might be classified under general, media, and art youth-led initiatives.
Positive societal transformation is the ultimate goal to be achieved for the identified problem, challenge or the desired positive change to take place. As part of reaching phase 3, it would be time for assessing the learning and development plan of the youth.
IDare focuses heavily on the emotional understanding and wellbeing of individuals. IDare believes that dialogue, mutual respect, and social cohesion and peacebuilding starts from having a prosperous status of emotional intelligence and wellbeing.
Building the capacities of people, we work with around understanding feelings and emotions and how they are influencing our decisions and taking part even in shaping our life and future. It is important to have the time to start working on our intelligence from the emotional side and to increase our vocabulary we are using while realising that we can move from one spectrum to the opposite one in order to boost our wellbeing and state of mind.
Having a profound understanding of who we are, why and how we are behaving the way we do, makes us more understanding and even more empathetic to the ones around us. All of this would lead to the overall wellbeing of the whole society and most importantly, everyone will start from their own small network among families and friends.
IDare lay the foundation by having some time dedicated to have an understanding and a reflection about our identities; individual and collective ones. The learning session(s) evolves around the individuals and the communities.
To understand and to go deeper into what makes us who we are and perhaps to go through the power around our identity and how to interact with others’ identities. It can be one exercise or a series of inter-related exercise serving a certain objective. It will always depend on group dynamics and the topic being covered.