Participatory Approaches Using Creative Methods to Strengthen Community Engagement and Ownership – Resource pack

Communities play significant roles in preventing and responding to the concerns children face, and they organise themselves in a variety of ways to protect children who are at risk. Community-level approaches to child protection look collectively for ways to support community members to protect children and ensure their rights to healthy development. In these approaches, external actors should seek to understand and build on already existing community capacities, structures and processes around children.

War Child Holland and Save the Children undertook a light touch review of published and grey literature, to establish the state of the evidence in relation to the impact and effectiveness of participatory approaches using creative methods to ensure community engagement and ownership. The purpose  of the related resource pack is to provide field staff looking for inspiring ideas in this regard with guidance, training and practical tools. The pack targets child protection field staff working in both development and humanitarian contexts who are engaging in community-level work and seeking to grow their soft skills in participatory facilitation using creative methods.

The complete pack includes the following parts:

• An introduction clarifying the background, purpose, target group and content of the resource pack.
• A Guidance Note: clarifies relevant key terms and concepts in community-level child protection, defines the different creative disciplines and methods central to this resource pack and explains the power of using a participatory approach drawing on creative methods to enable community engagement and ownership on child protection.
• A Toolkit: includes practical guides, manuals, handbooks and toolkits giving guidance on the use of participatory approaches through creative  disciplines such as performing arts, visual arts, ICT and media.
• A Two-Day Training: uses a ‘learning by doing’ approach to strengthen participants’ soft skills in participatory facilitation using creative methods.