Our Approach

-The SCORE Approach:

Everything we do is aimed at reclaiming family and community well-being.

How – We needed to find new tools to make sense of the world, because the ones we have are broken. The following tools allow us to approach everything, from climate change to humanitarian assistance, from WASH to clean energy, we always engage the community, considering culture, gender, and causal systems at play.

1. Culture & Locality

The only place where the superiority & privilege of men is not dominant as a cultural overlay of everything else in a community’s world view, are the mythical lands of Wakanda and the like.

• Therefore, it is imperative in order to bring change to a community to have a deep understanding of its culture.

  • its language,

  • history,

  • spirituality,

  • leadership structures,

  • taboos and norms.

• For that reason, to achieve gender equity, men need to be actively engaged in a community-designed program that

  • (a) respects their culture and

  • (b) recognizes and reinforces their importance to the family/community in new ways.

Then they are more likely to redefine masculinity and associated norms in a positive/supportive way that benefits the family and the community.

• The approach emphasizes cultural ways of knowing and discovering, and utilizes two key variables: skills and structured discussion forums (a safe place for men and women to discuss gender and other marginalization issues connected with any project in constructive ways).

2. Gender Equity

• Involves both Genders in any project, in meaningful, culturally relevant, beneficial ways.

• New ways of knowing, (Knowledge shared with both genders)

• Skills to use the knowledge in healthy, helpful and productive ways. (Skills to both genders)

• Bridging – a safe place and support from local champions to assist processing /aligning new information. (A way to connect the knowledge and skills in a culturally acceptable, gender transformative way for both genders.)

3. Causal Pathway

• Communities are based on multiple systems; political, religious, cultural, colonial, indigenous; all of which have different levels of strength and visibility depending on the situation. Causal Pathways includes contributions and analysis from both the intervention and other causes in the system.

• Explores deeply how the many costs of living are felt. Systemic & cultural cost, sexism, racism, ableism, exposing the constant and corrosive emotional and financial price of existence these normative attitudes extract from wellbeing.

• Power analysis derived from Pathways is critically important as the same event that is visible and interpreted as a positive outcome at a given point by an outsider, may be “revised” into a truer less acceptable outcome, in the less visible arena of the traditional religious or cultural setting. (affecting Sustainability and Replicability)

4. Community

• The community has the ability to solve their own problem often with existing resources or choosing to turn to external sources if necessary.

• Communities know what they need, although they may not initially know what the solution will look like.

• The Role of an external [Partner Agency] is to provide pictures/stories of options and to sequence & maintain structure not control of activities as invited.

What we do – We co participate with communities to address their chosen challenges by understanding tomorrows reality, using their culture and our tools, which open up discussions about how things could be, rather than simply how they are.

Result

A culturally based, gender transformative approach at the community level addresses underlying values and changes in family and community behaviour, rapidly & sustainably.

The approach leads to

• a positive multi-generational impact on gender equity.

• increase family social/emotional wellbeing,

• increased family income generation and

• decreased in gender-based violence in the family and the community.

Based on the evidence, this approach will make a significant, sustainable impact in virtually any sector of development from Agriculture to Health to Climate Change.