Gerald Frape
Gerald Frape is a social issues communicator who has been
working for 35 years with government and non-government organizations on a wide
range of social and environmental issues. Recently he visited Auroville again
and shared his knowledge with a variety of social project teams and
individuals.
What is your approach?
Whenever I come, I try to share my knowledge with groups and
individuals working in the area of social change. My aim was to help them
effectively communicate these issues to the audiences they were trying to
reach.
My approach is more dialogic than top-down. I begin by
trying to find out what sense the audience makes of the issue. Only after I
have understood this do I design the communication strategy. Particularly when
you’re working in a cross-cultural context, you really need to check your ideas
with your target audience while planning your strategy.
Most social change projects require about three quarters of
the time to plan and re...
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1 Comments
This is a wonderful article, and fits beautifully with Alan's reflections elsewhere in this issue on the dance between structure and openness. I'm hoping the younger generation in Auroville picks up on this as well.
That first step that Gerald spoke of - the need to research and plan - seems to have been the victim of the "Structure-phobia" I mentioned in a comment to Alan's article - the kind of "anti-mentalizing" dogma that I think has made it difficult for so many forward-looking movements around the world to execute their plans.
This is a very positive article and I hope to see more of this kind of flexible, integrative thinking. I am hoping that the deeper integral vision may also be more explicitly part of this integrative thinking as well.