COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT Form

Instructions and help about COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Translator: Monica Ronchi Reviewer: Saskia Clauss Thank you. The question: "can I help you?" is a question that millions of people ask millions of other people every single day. What does it actually mean to help another human being? Or indeed to help an entire community. I believe that helping is a powerful and often beautiful human impulse, but I also believe that helping has a shadow side, that certain styles or forms of helping, are actually doing more harm than good. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Harvard academic, puts it beautifully when she says that when we do change to people, they experience it as violence, but when people do change for themselves, they experience it as liberation. Today, I want to present a very simple idea and the idea is this: if we want to help people in a way that does no harm to them and their capacities in their communities, then the best place to start is with what is strong within them, and within their communities, and not with what's wrong. There