The Institute of Cultural and Personal Relationships (ICPR) offers experiential courses, consultancies and participation in community-based research for development workers and service providers working with other cultures at home or abroad. The focus is on the integration of cultural, social and personal development.
In development and humanitarian assistance work, the main focus has often been on how to transfer the development worker’s strategic and technical skills to local people in a foreign (sub-) culture with insufficient attention to personal, cultural, and social skills. Social development and humanitarian assistance work requires self-knowledge and awareness as well as knowledge of cultural and social development and technical skills in a given area. In the field of development work the lack of ability to integrate self-awareness with sociocultural development has often resulted in unsatisfactory improvements and personal frustrations expressed as lack of mutual respect and consensus, distancing, burn-out, and sometimes destructive personal behaviors (such as excessive alcohol, risky sexual behavior, abusiveness).
Often development workers are seen as merely interchangeable and invisible tools in translating policy into local practice. Their family situations, life courses and social habits are often seen as irrelevant to the performance of their jobs. [Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman, Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers, 2011]
The activities offered by ICPR are a response to these observations and reflections – in other words to the real-life experience and challenge of living and working in developing countries and immigrant populations.
Building relationships in these situations requires similar approaches including:
- a systemic perspective,
- multi-way inclusive processes,
- seeing other people as equals,
- seeing the strength in other cultures and in the people of those cultures,
- working in truly participatory ways,
- self-awareness and self-care,
- an open attitude to learning,
- working in integrity within foreign cultures.
ICPR is interested in fostering an open dialogue with development workers, service providers and others.
Calendar
6th-17th August 2012 and 11th-22nd March 2013COURSE FOR AID AND DEVELOPMENT WORKERS |
