Onward to 2021!
Hello Colleague,

Holiday Greetings! As the first COVID-19 Vaccines roll out, this may indeed be a season of hope after a horribly tragic 2020. As the head of DEVEX recently stated, this year may have set development back a decade, but it may have accelerated the transformation of development by a decade.

The #1 lesson COVID taught us is the importance of community leadership. As outside “experts” were pulled out, community leaders stepped forward to protect their neighbors. With megaphones and WhatsApp groups, they networked and demanded access to information and voice in governance. Their action represents a giant step to #ShiftThePower in ways that are vital to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development goals.

Yesterday, Movement members reflected on these lessons and identified priorities for 2021 to further support these courageous and resilient leaders. We invite you to bring your leadership to increase our collective impact in the New Year – starting with the items below.

Best wishes to you and your family for the New Year,

John Coonrod, co-founder and global coordinator.

Will Communities Trust the Vaccines?
What have we learned from community leaders on how to develop the community trust required for an effective universal rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine? The two facilitators of these conversations - Gunjan Veda (MCLD) and Nelly Mecklenburg(ISE) - have summarized these lessons in a new article here. 

In December, Gunjan and Nelly facilitated an excellent conversation with Suhayla Bazbaz, Founder & Director, Community Cohesion and Social Innovation, Dr. Rashed Shah, Child Health Advisor, Save the Children and Carey Westgate, Deputy Director, Community Health Impact Coalition on the uptake of vaccinations and the role of community organizations in vaccination programs.

We have a “day”! Who knew? Eleven Days for CLD!

January 28 is Global Community Engagement Day, invented in Australia in 2018. We’re seizing this opportunity to launch 11 Days for Community-led Development, from January 18-28, to highlight each of the 11 components of CLD developed by our collaborative research scoping group. Please join us in blogging, meme-ing or posting video messages.  

Join us January 27 for "Local Means Local"
Let’s begin 2021 by celebrating Community-Led Development (CLD) and learning from MCLD’s Collaborative Research Project based on 176 CLD programs across 65 countries at “Local Means Local: New Tools for Strengthening Community-Led Development.” (photo: Outreach International)

Join IDEAL and MCLD as we share the findings of this research and launch new collaboratively developed tools to assess and improve locally-led development programming. During this event, we will learn more about what organizations are doing when they say they are undertaking CLD programming and how locally-led programming differs across contexts. We will introduce a CLD Assessment Tool that can be used for self, peer or participatory review to make programs more “local” and community led, and a Quality Appraisal tool to ensure that the evaluations of such programs are robust. This bi-lingual learning event (English and French) will be valuable for anyone involved in international development — Donors, Policy-makers, Directors, Program Managers, Monitoring and Evaluation Officers. 

Date: Wednesday, January 27, 2021. Time: 8 am - 10:40 am ET