الصفحة الرئيسية

Community Organizing and Mobilization

As strategies, community organizing and mobilization are crucial to achieving inclusiveness and ensuring that the energies and resources of groups and local communities are maximally harnessed in the struggle for the realization of ESC rights. Using these methods, human rights defenders may help:

  • to empower individuals and communities to develop a sense of ownership of the human rights agenda by focusing on issues that impact on their daily lives, and thereby imbuing human rights with a substantive dimension;
  • embolden socially excluded groups, strengthen control of their own internal affairs, and raise their profile, visibility and social bargaining power;
  • strengthen the capacity of communities to collect and analyze data relevant to their ESC rights concerns; and
  • facilitate community participation in national and local economic and social development planning and programs.

In the use of community organizing and mobilization, human rights defenders should endeavor to avoid the pitfall of using the apparently neutral and harmonious notion of “community” as a means to ignore possible internal dynamics and differences that may exist among the various groups or sub-groups within the community. It is suggested that close attention be paid to the peculiar needs and concerns of those with the least potential to be heard, and therefore a higher possibility of being marginalized in the affairs of the community.

The following case summaries illustrate how human rights defenders have mobilized communities to protect and promote ESC rights:

For more information, please see the section on “Education and Mobilization” from Ripple in Still Water: Reflection by Activists on Local- and National-Level Work in Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.