Building upwards from the ground - Interview
Reverend Canon Ted Karpf: Provincial Canon Missioner, Office of HIV/AIDS Community Ministries and Mission, Anglican Church of the Province of South Africa
I co-ordinated the Church of the Province of South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Ministries strategic planning process and worked as part of the facilitation team that ran the planning workshops.
The planning process we followed is made up of five steps:
Step 1: Situational analysis
Step 2: Identifying issues, solutions and options
Step 3: Making strategic choices
Step 4: Developing objectives and activities
Step 5: Monitoring and evaluation
We adapted each step of the planning process to reflect the values of the Church and to encourage participant “buy-in”.
Because we are asking churches to transform themselves, it was important to root the planning process in a theological context. Initially I just thought we were going to talk about HIV/AIDS, but we soon learned that the religious tradition had a lot more to say about the issue than we gave it credit for. What churches and faith-based organisations need to remember is where they come from, so each step of the planning process was framed with story, prayer, singing, meditation, preaching and worship.
We quickly stumbled onto the formula that you couldn’t start the planning process without some kind of prayer or invocation – it was as though we had to set the agenda spiritually. And, in many ways we had to guarantee that this was a spiritual experience in as much as it was a planning one because people didn’t want to participate in an NGO-type undertaking. They wanted to “do the Church,” and find solutions within their theological context.
Something we learned along the way that was so subtle that it could easily have been missed was that the choice of song, or the repetition of a chorus, would indicate how the planning process was going. People in church often divide time by song and at the end of each task the group would sing. We came to recognise that if the group had sung three to four choruses in the course of an hour then we had made good progress. If they only sang one, we realised we had more work to do.
Let’s look at each step more closely and what we did to get the most out of every planning session.
Step 1: Situational analysis
We began by asking participants what they had seen, heard or felt about HIV/AIDS in their communities. This made the planning process deeply personal and allowed people to think constructively about their communities, their issues and experiences. Throughout the planning workshops we kept referring back to the questions of what had been seen, heard or felt to check that the objectives participants identified did address the reality of HIV/AIDS.
The use of story is also critical - especially in developing countries with old cultures because the communication methodology is very much about narrative. So we commissioned a professional writer to write a true story for us to use as a tool in the planning workshops.
People learn by telling stories and it provides them with a way in to understanding a situation. They might think, “I can’t do a situational analysis of my community,” but if you tell them a story, this changes. They can look at a character and tell you what the character is experiencing and then it becomes simple for them to make the leap from the story back to their own lives. If people battled to make this shift, we could always ask, "If you were a character in the story, what would you see and how would you feel?” Or, “What problems would that character be faced with?” It was almost as if we needed an alter-ego to get out of our selfishness in order to come up with a deeper and more responsive understanding of the situation.
You can see how this connects to the church. There is a biblical narrative, there’s the narrative of my life and then there’s the narrative of my community and I do better if I can tell it to you that way. All that we keep doing is introducing people to different frames and different metaphors to which they could tell their story.
Step 2: Identifying issues, solutions and options
To help find solutions and identify options, it was important to uncover what the underlying problems facing each diocese were. This is hard to do and it is easy to get distracted by the symptoms and finding solutions to those rather than understanding the true nature of the problem. We found two approaches helpful. One relied on the use of stories, while the other involved helping communities formulate problem statements.
Let’s look first at how storytelling can be a valuable tool. The two stories we predominantly used were “It rained that day...” and the story about the sheep falling into the river. Both served as valuable gateways to planning.
The story about the sheep is really simple but it is a metaphor everybody understands. It goes like this: A community relies on its sheep but they have an ongoing problem. Every week sheep fall into the river and drown. In response to the problem, the community has established a sheep rescue league and the church has also become involved in trying to save the drowning sheep. The government has also responded by putting up nets to stop the sheep from being washed away.
The metaphor is direct – there are many community and government initiatives that have been established to tackle HIV/AIDS, but many of these address the symptoms, rather than the root cause of the problem.
During the story telling, we then encourage the community to take a figurative walk up the river. What they are likely to find is that far upstream, on the opposite bank, which makes it difficult for them to see, the river has eroded away the bank and one of the fence stakes has come loose. This creates a small hole that enables the sheep to fall through and into the river.
It’s important not to catastrophise the cause of the problem, nor to lay blame with any person or sector of the community. Rather, erosion has happened and, through nobody’s fault, there is a hole in fence. This is all it takes, however, for the sheep to slip through, fall into the river and drown.
The next step then, is to ask communities to identify where the holes in their “fence” may lie.
This story illustrates the difference between an issue and a problem and is only important in that it helps make issues - and the possibility of finding a solution - real for people. This story also helped us get people to question assumptions in their communities. We could ask, “But why is it that x or y problem exists? Where is the hole in your fence? Then we could challenge a group and say, “Don’t tell me the problem is HIV/AIDS, but rather explain to me how your community got there in the first place.”
Another tool in identifying problems lies in being able to formulate problem statements. Here are some guidelines. Statements should:
- be constructed using negative using words such as “insufficient”, “a lack of” or “never”.
- tell us what the problem is and who is involved (i.e. the what and the who should be specific).
Some examples of problem statements include:
- “Church leadership has shown inadequate commitment to dealing with HIV/AIDS”;
- “There is insufficient church-driven care and support to deal with orphans and vulnerable children in our area”;
- “There are funerals every week for young people, but our minister never raises the issue of HIV/AIDS in church.”
During the planning process what people began to understand is that they have been terrified by the numbers and the sheer magnitude of the HIV/AIDS problem. But, when you draw their attention back towards their communities, they consistently came up with local answers to local issues at a local level. And most of their solutions didn’t require vast amounts of money. Instead, they required fortitude and will.
At the end of the process you should see how people swell in pride because they have come up with solutions that they know are theirs. And all we have done is guide them through a story. They are in the story. This has all the wonderful layers of being in the story and being about the story. The same would hold true in that communities become the process as much as they’re the people driving the process.
Step 3: Making strategic choices
Making strategic choices was difficult because of the very divergent and, at times, conflictual responses to issues around prevention, condom use and sexuality.
What the All Africa Conference on HIV/AIDS did was give us a common language and claimed a consensus that here-to-forth had been otherwise undeliverable. The week prior to the Boksburg conference we had one of our Archbishops burning condoms in his province and another distributing them in his! That’s how far apart we were. What we did during the planning workshops, rather than deal with strategies for prevention, was tackle the concept of prevention and reclaim it theologically.
So, when it came to making strategic choices, we emphasised the vision statement that came out of the Boksburg conference and the six priority areas of leadership, care, prevention, counselling, pastoral care and death and dying. We used these six building blocks at all the diocesan planning workshops. In this way each diocese is guided by a common language, despite the differences that might divide them. So, it didn’t matter what strategic choices a community made so long as they focused on the key common areas that were used across the CPSA.
Step 4: Developing objectives and activities
It is easy for a planning process to get loaded with the expectation of a neat set of outcomes, but we didn’t attempt to predict the outcomes at all. What we did promise, however, is that everybody would have 12 objectives by the end of the planning workshop because this was the goal. What these objectives were and how we got there, however, differed depending on the literacy levels of the community and their levels of sophistication and self-understanding.
The one way to avoid determining the outcome is to really model respect in everything you do. No group should be facilitated by one person, for instance, because there is too much risk in dominating and shaping it. The honesty of a second person in the room helps keep the balance. The facilitation team was cross- trained on everything enough so that every member of the team could do every part - except for the preaching. So, there would be times when I would be very quiet and just do the preaching, while in others I would be more proactive and push and shove.
Our approach really depended on the audience and the trainers were comfortable to move and shift to accommodate the needs of the community. The processes were all identical - and yet they were all different. It was quite thrilling.
At times I was disappointed by the outcome because communities weren’t where I would have liked them to be. But the content was never ours to say. Despite any misgivings I might have had, the bottom line is that the outcomes had integrity for the community. My choice was to accept the outcomes or die because this was all we were going to get at that time. It was a very important learning to go out there, do our planning work and come to terms with the fact that people needed to do their own thing too.
The beauty of a process such as this is that for the first time people could engage with the issue of HIV/AIDS without the fear of being swamped. So, we have a global agenda on the one level, but we also have an incredibly accessible means of getting there. What people were able to say is, “HIV/AIDS is a massive problem within our communities. But, we are only going to address this much of it because that is what we can do.”
Some of our critics have said that all of our plans are theoretical, but I don’t believe this process is a theoretical thing that you do and come out with a theoretical plan. Instead, we bring to the fore all the solutions that the community decides are important. If you decide, for instance, that reading books is what you are doing in response to AIDS, then that is your Church’s decision. There’s nothing theoretical about that.
Step 5: Monitoring and evaluation
The purpose of monitoring and evaluation is not to talk about the goodness or badness of a project but rather to look at each new situation and the new situational analysis compared to the old actions. We want to encourage people to ask, “Is the action that I am doing consistent with the situation that I am confronted with?” Often times it is not. Communities need to be evaluating their initiatives constantly so they can free themselves to make better choices in the future.
