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Facilitating learning and development... Community Development Resource Association

CDRA's Approach to Learning from the inside, out...

The CDRA, based in Cape Town, South Africa, was founded in 1987 as an organisation development consultancy NGO, operating within the development sector. From the beginning, our primary allegiance has been to the process of development rather than to consultancy as a professional practice or source of income. Over the years, and emerging out of a distinctively African perspective, our form of development practice has evolved to a point where we now offer a critical and challenging approach to the entire global development sector.

In the course of our work we have gained a great deal of insight into the process of development, into development practice as a specific intervention and response, and into the field of organisation, through which development is largely effected. And we have, from the beginning, wanted to share whatever we have been learning. Thus a variety of "training" courses have been run over the years, all of them meeting with a very favourable response.

These courses have undergone various changes in form and content as the needs of our client base and circumstances of the world within which we work have shifted. To date over 20 courses have been run throughout southern and East Africa, involving almost 400 people in a variety of in-depth processes of personal and professional development. Increasingly, course participants are also drawn from further afield, including South-east Asia, West Africa and Northern Europe, all of whom bring pressing questions about development and best approaches to tackling the challenges it presents.

Despite the diversity in participants, locale and immediate focus, we have observed that all courses share a common thread – the striving for a new kind of social development practice. The realisation has also grown that "training" is an entirely inappropriate foundation for the building of a social development practice, which is best honed through structured processes of learning.

These two insights have led the CDRA to consolidate its courses into a clutch of programmes which, taken together, form a set of structured learning opportunities suitable for a wide range of development practitioners. In this way we wish to open, and make accessible, the CDRA’s particular and alternative slant on development practice.

Our courses are characterised by a number of related features, all of which have remained constant over time and throughout the various programmes. These are:

• a humanistic orientation – seeing development in human centred terms, a belief in the power of consciousness, and cultivation of the will as a necessary requirement for true social change. A recognition that social development involves the facilitation of inherent forces of life, not simply the implementation of material projects.
  
• a systems approach – seeing people, and the forms and institutions they create as all integrally connected, in relationship with one another, and thus affecting each other, so that relationship becomes the central element which characterises the system.
  
• an organisational approach – humans are social beings and this is most expressed through the organisations and institutions we create. Irrespective of whether our specialisation and expertise is with organisations themselves (as in Organisation Development), almost all social initiatives are undertaken with the vehicle of "organisation". Thus, social intervention requires an understanding of social organisation.
  
• a developmental approach – implying that the process of change is towards enlargement, rather than reduction. Seeing it as unpredictable and open-ended, a process requiring a dynamic and living, rather than instrumental or mechanical response. This is a process that must be prepared for through gathering a surplus of inner resourcefulness, rather than one that can be definitively and exhaustively planned for in advance.
  
• a commitment to, and methodology for, approaching development from the inside out. Unless agents and agencies of development are actively and consciously engaged in their own internal developmental change processes, there is little chance that they can play any significant role in facilitating meaningful change in the relationships of which they are a part. In practical terms, this requires that intervention into "another" must begin with understanding of, and intervention into "self". This is true for individual practitioners as well as for organisations and institutions.

These defining characteristics of our approach to structured learning also constitute the basis of our approach to social change and intervention. They are reflected prominently in the design, content and methodology of all our courses and are experienced tangibly by those participating in the courses.

About the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA)

The Community Development Resource Association (CDRA) was  established in 1987 as a non-profit, non-governmental organisation (NGO) to build the capacity of organisations and individuals engaged in development and social transformation. We are based in Cape Town, South Africa and work mostly in Southern and East Africa.

Email: vernon@cdra.org.za Webpage: http://www.cdra.org.za
P.O. Box 221, Woodstock, 7915, South Africa
Telephone: -27 -21 462 3902
Fax: -27 -21 462 3918