Community Learning Development Resource 602 – 10
THE NEED FOR FAIR AND JUST PRACTICE IN OUR MISSION
SUMMARY
Our Mission is to engage through Community Learning with small, local, disadvantaged neighbourhoods and communities and to support them by:
- Identifying their learning needs and wants in their communities
- Supporting them if they are non-confident, non-traditional learners to choose and access learning opportunities
- Planning and managing with clients opportunities for people in their communities
- Encouraging and enabling them to use new capacity to the benefit of their neighbourhoods and communities.
The means by which this mission can be achieved are:
- By supporting individuals into new, small scale learning opportunities, and enabling them to build confidence and self-esteem, and enabling them to identify and pursue their own learning needs
- By helping learners to recognise, value and use their own learning success
- By identifying and making clear the routes available to progressive learning opportunities
- By empowering individuals and the local community to manage their own learning – empowering learners and building sustainability
- By building individual and collective capacity in the local community which will be able to contribute to regeneration and renewal
This mission will be underpinned by
- A commitment to the voluntary nature of the learner commitment
- A recognition that this development work takes time and that not all potential learners will necessarily go on to more formal education and training opportunities
- The need to offer a range of options to those learners who move on into other opportunities
- A belief in the contribution that learning opportunities of this kind can make to the regeneration of local communities
- A belief in the empowerment of individual learners, and the freedom for them to be able to make informed learning choices, which may include the rejection of any further formal learning opportunities.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- How do these ideas fit with your understanding of the nature of learning in the community and individual capacity building?
- How do these ideas fit with your understanding of the nature of learning in the community and community capacity building?
- Do these ideas fit with your role and that of your agency