Mutual Aid and Community Led Responses (#2)

10 Dec 2024 | Se La Vi

Community level responses have been the main driving force for survival in Gaza. It comes very naturally – even if the volunteers have not been trained. They are survivors and they can do anything.

Male respondent, Khan Younis, Gaza

This newsletter coincides with the publication of a briefing paper produced and launched jointly by the Community Led Initiatives Palestine Working Group & Local2Global Protection. Based on interviews and text message exchanges with groups and individuals in Gaza, the brief draws attention to the responses volunteers have engaged in across Gaza since October 7, 2023.

The paper explains how, “as victims, survivors, and first responders to the crisis, volunteers among the civilian population in Gaza have provided immediate and longer-term protection and other forms of assistance where it is most needed: rescuing wounded from the rubble; recovering bodies for burial; providing shelter, food, water, clothing, blankets, medical and psychosocial care, and sharing crucial information as well as cash with the most vulnerable. In-depth consultations with key informants showed that mutual aid and community-led responses were among the first and the most important emergency responses – even when compared to externally led humanitarian interventions.”

When asked for the advice they’d give to external aid actors, responders requested that local communities and volunteers living in the crisis have deeper involvement and leadership of responses. Alongside greater inclusion, requests to ensure more relevant responses, and better-quality assistance and implementation of aid were equally prominent.

“It’s difficult for me to see all these people suffering, always crying, with no needs met. I have strength, access to some resources, and we need to minimize other people’s suffering. If it’s only by talking with them, this is what I need to do.”

Female respondent, Khan Younis, Gaza.

The brief is associated with an annex presenting about 100 examples of how volunteer groups have responded. Together the brief and the detailed annex draw attention to the hitherto under reported and underestimated humanitarian work carried out in collaboration between volunteer mutual aid groups and more organised community led responses associated with the work of local and international responders – including groups with prior experience with the “supporting community led responses” (sclr) approach.

Download the Report

Download the Annex

As interest in supporting community led responses (sclr) and its interactions with spontaneous mutual aid, continues to grow, a network of national and regional practitioners is developing around the sclr approach.

In East Africa, an sclr Community of Practice brings together practitioners from Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan and South Sudan in online meetings every month. The EA sclr CoP are planning a larger face to face meeting later this year. In the Democratic Republic of Congo eight organisations begun exchanging their experience with sclr in early 2024.

Sclr has been picked up by a growing number of organisations in Ukraine and many of them exchange experience through two networks focused on peer learning among both national and international organisations.

On the back of two sclr workshops in June, a newly formed Colombia/Latin America Comunidad de Práctica brings together eight national and three international NGOs. During the workshop Blanchard Louis was invited to share experiences with sclr in Haiti. Blanchard explained how in Haiti “the traditional culture and way of working was community facilitation without the need for external help; sclr has brought this back, with more awareness and solidarity.”

“If they can do sclr in Haiti, we can do it here [in Honduras and Colombia]. Listening to Blanchard from Haiti was inspirational; there are so many challenges there, but they are able to stand up and continue. That allows us to reflect on our own context”.

Participants at sclr workshop in Colombia

Illustration of what and who makes up communities in the contexts of Latin American workshop participants, June 2024. The image indicates the interconnectedness of multiple factors – including risks and opportunities.

Photo: Mandeep Mudhar, 2024

In the Philippines collaboration between several local and national organisation continue but has not been strictly formalised. In Haiti and Myanmar, current political and security situations make it difficult to meet but online support and peer exchange continue to grow and expand.

In the MENA region online meetings are held bi-monthly and a peer learning event in person is planned in the region for later this year. Since its beginning a few years back, the MENA Hub has had a strong focus on peer learning between the countries in the region and this happens both between senior managers, project officers and, not least, between community facilitators across Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey, Iraq and Syria.

If you would like to know more about these national and regional sclr networks, please see here for more detail and contacts.

We shouldn’t limit dreaming with how much money we have or don’t have – we need to break down our own prejudices.

Participant at sclr workshop in Colombia

In several regions and countries, sclr practitioners are increasingly working with private and government donors as well as UNOCHA-led pooled funds to explore increased support for community led responses. L2GP supports this work and always from the perspective that it is locally-led and decentralised experiences that will deliver the best responses.
To better prepare professional humanitarian workers to engage in constructive and meaningful ways with the volunteer aid activists who are the real first responders in many crises across the world, L2GP has developed introductions to mutual aid and community led responses in collaboration with a number of academic institutions who offer graduate and postgraduate courses in humanitarian work.

We call these courses “Locally led crisis response: The future of aid – how to support it“. If you would like to know more about these courses, or work with an institution that would like to host such a session/course, please get in touch with us here.

Photos and images can be used in many ways – also in humanitarian work. Recently, our contributing editor nils carstensen brought together photos and words in a personal reflection on how moments of beauty are needed to make it through often devastating crises. If nothing else the resulting exhibition and associated catalogue show that photography in humanitarian contexts may be so much more than just another fundraising tool.

Please find the Ca va un Peu exhibition catalogue here.

A guide to the terminology

The growing interest in mutual aid and community led responses, at times leads to some confusion. Here’s how we understand and use some of the key terms:

Mutual Aid is the spontaneous and voluntary action of individuals, families and groups to help others from their wider community who are facing crises. Also known as community-led response, it happens based on affected people’s own resources and informal coordination.

Supporting community led response (sclr) is one approach for building on mutual aid. Sclr aims to strengthen communities’ capacity to respond to rapid emergencies as well as reducing vulnerability to future crises. It uses a number of tools (including microgrants) to maximise local ownership, responsiveness, and connectivity while minimising the risks of doing harm. National NGOs (and where relevant local authorities) are seen as the primary facilitators of sclr.

The Group Cash Transfer (GCT) guidelines were produced by CalP drawing from sclr but focusing primarily on the modalities of transferring small grants to community groups to respond to emergencies. GCT seeks to simplify the sclr process and can be used to channel funds to a range of community groups for different sectoral or community driven outcomes, using a common (CalP) technical understanding and compliance approach.

“Se la vi” is L2GP’s newsletter. With a focus on supporting community led responses, it is published 3 – 4 times a year. “Se la vi” takes its name from Haiti, where the banner photo was shot a few weeks after the 2010 earthquake. At L2GP we believe in people, poetry, and good visual art – rather than relying too heavily on LogFrames and policy papers. Thus, you may come across the occasional poem, quote or photograph with little or no explanation.