Urban Leadership Foundation
A hub for leadership training in cities and among the world's 1.4 billion slum-dwellers
Summary
Schilderman, T. and O. Ruskulis (2005). Building Bridges with the Grassroots: Scaling up through Knowledge Sharing. Warwickshire,, ITDG, Schumaker Centre for Technology and Development.
Top down approaches to slum development are ineffective because costly and slow. Scaling up of grass roots development is an option explored in this book, developed as a project of a working committee of UN Habitat.
Slum dwellers are primary actors in socio-economic change. There are many examples of change organizations, but how can these be scaled up.
This book examines scaling up methods including: peer training, exchange visits, information networks, and appropriate communication.
It documents 10 diverse case studies, mostly from Africa.
Evaluation: It is not clear why they chose these items, but seems to be a focus on communication of information about successful approaches. However, these methods form part of Community Organization toolkits, though with a basis much more on concerted action than information flow. They are part of the Movement Leadership paradigm: Networking, story-telling consultations, information packages as part of effective networks; and communication skills, but again based on multiplication of leaders through action rather than multiplication of information, which is a subsidiary goal.
It does nothing to address the issues of resourcing networks, consultations, federations, all inherently dependent processes on outside resourcing, nor on the issues of structural expansion of fundraising at the base. These are significant bottlenecks to the speed and effectiveness of such processes.
The case study in Chapter 10 is significant on a history of organizing infrastructure in Nairobi slums.
write out two passages about this principle
In 4 paragraphs describe the leader,and his exercise of this principle.
Name 3-6 books about this topic