Changing the world

Margaret Ledwith writes about changing the world in Participatory Practice, (2010) Policy Press :
We believe that the process of transformation often gets stuck at the personal, group or project stage… if you think participatively and ecologically, everything is interconnected and stuckness is a failure to make key connections for energy to flow in the system with the necessary feedback process. It is these processes that tip a system into a new way of being. We can engage in the dialogical, reflexive process within a community, but unless we extend that engagement to all who connect with the community, we are not opening up the valves for the process to become collective. We have to engage with communities of practice in ever-increasing cycles of reflection and action. …
From a practical perspective, there needs to be a commitment to continuous revolution, inner and outer. It involves linking people across systems, connecting with others.

Paulo Freire emphasised that transformative change begins in grassroots communities, and it is the powerless who, in liberating themselves, are the ones who liberate the powerful. Freire, P(1972) Pedagogy of the oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Community development is people development: people developing the power and self-worth to use their skills and knowledge to create positive change. It is about transfer of power to those local leaders…
The work of the community practitioner is to create the context for developing the skills and knowledge for people to join together collectively to bring about change. As individual issues becomes shared, a group establishes a project, projects become organised under a community-wide umbrella, perhaps a community forum, this provides a level of organising that leads to alliances, and alliances unite as movements for change. This brings back full circle to participatory democracy. … So community development, while building grassroots groups which link together to form social movem,ents, still retains local collective power to participate in decisions that improve local well-being. In this constant local-global dynamic, participatory democracy sustains a way of life on earth as a flourishing, mutual ecosystem.

After having some ideas about the process of transformation through the key stage levels of changing ourselves, connecting with others and changing the world, we must compare it to Conductive Education and find the similarities between those elements and our everyday practice.