Popular Education, Social Solidarity and the Internet
Caledonia Centre for Social Development, April 2005
The Centre exists to help eliminate poverty. It views social development as the
process of building a more equitable system of political economy
grounded in the principles of social justice and asset democracy. It uses the
internet to promote popular education and to build social solidarity.
Current medium to long term interests include:
- the promotion of cooperatives, social enterprises and self-help organisation
as a means of creating jobs and wealth, reducing poverty, ensuring community
well-being and increasing voice and representation;
- the countervailing power dimensions of user participation in research,
participatory development and global social justice - particularly through the
'popularisation of policy' and the application of fairtrade;
- building organisations of the poor through developing community-to-community
extension services in which groups of socially active poor people act as the
agents of their own development processes;
- land reform, land rights and land information systems as tools of poverty
elimination and equitable development.
The internet is used for:
- helping 'make the links' between different sources of information. Many of
these are buried deep in labyrinthine websites or have been lost to the public
domain.
- popularising and web-publishing a variety of short, thought provoking articles
drawn from a wide range of sources (including practitioner 'grey literature')
- highlighting and encouraging the potential for increased networking,
synergies, and information and skills sharing.
Note that the Centre is:
- not trying to compete with better financed and staffed Internet development
gateway sites and portals. Rather it seeks to compliment them by bringing a
'fresh voice and perspective'.
- not pretending to be neutral and value free. It openly declares its solidarity
with the poor, and with progressive forces for global social justice.
About Caledonia's Websites
As part of its popular education and information dissemination work the Centre
runs a cluster of inter-related public domain websites of which the land reform
and social land websites are the largest of their kind in the United Kingdom.
Papers on the social and cooperative economy (e.g. UN policy guidance to
national governments) plus articles on new localism, mutualisation of public
services, community enterprise, credit unions and cooperatives; countervailing
power and global social justice; participatory research and development; policy
popularisation of poverty reduction strategy papers, etc. Links to global
websites on poverty reduction; cooperative development agencies and research
institutions; and international civil society fora. (At end of Oct 2004 - 302
htm files and 125 doc and pdf files)
Key papers, articles and briefings on land reform, land rights, land tenure
issues in Scotland and internationally (mainly sub-Saharan Africa). The site
provides links to Scottish, UK and International land reform websites. It is the
largest land reform site in the UK. (At end of Oct 2004 - 279 htm files and 111
doc and pdf files)
Case studies and sector assessments of the scale and extent of social
landownership in Scotland. The site contains over 25 Scottish case studies;
articles on the US Land Trust movement; and 6 Canadian forestry case studies.
(At end of Oct 2004 - 95 htm files and 8 doc and pdf files)
Key documents on common property rights in Scotland - overview, history and
current state of common property plus links to international common property
research centres.
This is a joint project between the Centre and Andy Wightman an independent land
researcher. It seeks to provide publicly accessible rural land tenure
information on Scotland. The website contains landownership information linked
to maps of all private properties over 100 hectares on a county by county basis.
25-page booklet which sets out current best practice in establishing and running
networks of part time community development agents whose purpose is to support
local livelihood and well-being initiatives.
Comprehensive set of guidance papers and exercises on how to organise, develop
and run training of trainers courses using participatory techniques.
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