Healing and Development Processes Need to be Rooted in the Culture of the People.
Culture may be described as the software of the mind. It shapes how people think, learn, and solve problems, what they value and respect, what attracts and delights them, what offends them, and their sense of what is appropriate.
More deeply, culture is the soil in which the tree of identity has its roots. People's sense of who they are, and of their self-efficacy is bound up in their (often unconscious) connections to their cultures. To disconnect or alienate people from their cultural foundations is like plucking a plant from the soil in which it is rooted.
The renowned futurist, Willis Harman, had this to say about culture:
"Whole societies can perceive things that observers from other cultures do not, so we have to be cautious about claiming that some class of experience is universal."
This implies that whole cultural communities may actually experience phenomena such as alcohol and drug abuse, success and failure, love and hate, and other experiences differently than another.
Not only do distinct cultures have unique perceptions not experienced by other cultures, but they also have unique gifts and abilities. They can know things, see things, experience things, and do things that people from other cultures cannot. This is a very important understanding. It means that each distinct cultural group has community members with unique strengths and capacities upon which healing and development can be based.
You cannot build on what is wrong or missing. You have to build on who people actually are and what they have. It also means that the effective approaches for solving actual social and economic problems may look very different in different cultural communities.
Following is a list of some key areas related to healing and development that need to be guided from within the culture of the people. We spell out those points in some detail in order to stress that almost all cultures have ways of doing all of these things. It is very important to help people to discover their own ways of addressing each of these areas.
a. The process used for consultation, for decision making, and for reaching consensus.
b. The analysis of current realities, conditions, and needs.
c. The interpretation of how the past has shaped the present and how outside influences have affected everyday life.
d. A description of a sustainable future that is desirable and possible (i.e. a vision).
e. An articulation of the values and principles that will guide development action.
f. The selection and priority setting of the goals of development.
g. The selection of healing and program strategies.
h. The making of the plans.
i. How the health development promoting organization is structured and how the program functions, who controls it, how it runs on a day-to-day basis, who is selected to work in it (and how this selection is made), how the organization fosters the participation of the people it serves, how conflicts are dealt with, how accountability is handled, and how money is managed.
j. The indicators of success that are chosen.
k. Evaluation of the process and the outcomes.
l. How healing and development experiences are interpreted and plowed back into new analysis and new efforts.
Principle 6 of the SIXTEEN PRINCIPLES FOR C0-CREATING A SUSTAINABLE, HARMONIOUS, AND PROSPEROUS WORLD
