The Community Engagement Centre (CEC) has been active across a range of diverse urban and rural populations throughout Pakistan and works closely with marginalised communities.
The collective nature of Pakistani culture and its social inequities has required the CEC to recognize the intersections that shape contexts and situations, to promote local ownership, empower communities to identify and utilize existing resources for sustainable change, and improve health outcomes. Through an immersive community engagement (CE) strategy, CEC utilises participatory tools to collect stories from communities to understand their lived experiences, barriers and enablers to access, and the dynamics of power that influence these.
To understand this complex relationship, a Catalytic Framework that examined the intersections within communities’ narratives was developed. Preliminary review of community narratives collected as part of programmatic operations yielded four significant elements: (1) unique, individual circumstances, (2) aspects of identity, (3) types of discrimination (if present), and (4) larger structures that reinforce exclusion (or enforce inclusion). A unique feature identified within the process of CE was the role of ‘catalysts’ – one or many people who may have transformative potential at any of these levels due to their influence, active facilitation, or agency.
This novel framework enables an understanding of the threads of experience and identifying the elements and structures that impact lives of Pakistan’s diverse population. It works by recognizing the visible intersections of class, identity, gender, and power, as well as questioning what remains unarticulated, and thus promotes meaningful community engagement across different cultures and fields
