Face to Face: Notes from the Network on Community Exchange

“FACE TO FACE” was produced by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, part of a larger grassroots coalition which also includes groups in southern Africa and which supports exchange programmes between people in poverty who are committed to working in solidarity to address their
own housing problems and living conditions.

This publication, laid out in newspaper form, stresses the power of horizontal exchange, a common strategy among development professionals and politicians who enlarge their own thinking by meeting with peers in other places, but an approach that is seldom available to groups in poverty,
whose isolation can sabotage confidence, creative thinking and incremental learning. Face to Face grounds the principles underlying these efforts by drawing on the actual experiences of those involved in community exchange, whether they are members of a Bangkok group who live under bridges visiting another Thai community to see a housing project underway, or people from the South African Homeless People’s Federation learning from women pavement dwellers in Bombay. Contributions come also from those involved in supporting and organizing exchanges. The experiences recounted are rich, complex and often contradictory in the insights they yield. But by building on experience, ideas are enlarged and refined in a constant feedback process.

This mix of anecdotes and lessons learned are organized under 15 headings which, in themselves, communicate something of the vitality and openness to learning of these groups. These are not rigid categories or even guidelines but, rather, overlapping and fluid approaches to a process
which invites readers and participants to discover other connections and themes. The headings are:
• What actually happens when poor people go to visit other poor people?
• Building a pool of people’s wisdom through a process of regional exchange.
• Those who face problems know best what needs to change and how to do it.
• We learn more from what we see and hear than from what we’re taught.
• Learning within a reality that is messy needs to be a little messy itself.
• You learn when you teach and teach best while you're learning.
• When ideas move in people’s hands, they change, adapt and create new solutions.
• The farther away you travel, the more you can understand about yourself.
• You only do those things collectively which you cannot do individually.
• You cannot make real change without large numbers of people and big scale.
• To make change, people at many levels need to believe that change is possible.
• Change takes time and it almost never happens according to schedule.
• Linking in wider alliances brings the global process into your own back yard.
• Expanding poor people’s repertoire of learning and teaching tools.
• How poor communities use exchange strategically to fine tune their negotiating.

Embedded in these sections are practical pointers on issues as specific as improving a walkway and as general as negotiation or scaling up. The publication includes a list of groups to contact.