This recently-published paper addressed the need for transformational approaches to releasing the potential of stakeholders to achieve development goals, to build on and extend beyond current best practices in participation and capacity strengthening. A balanced assessment will recognize the noble or prosocial potential of people to harmonize the pursuit of personal interests with a willingness to contribute to social and collective development goals. We need to empower individuals, communities and institutions to be active protagonists of development, which requires approaches that consider their antecedent knowledge, values and culture, stance, agency, roles, relationships, and learning.
In 1989, Jamshid Aidun pioneered to Guyana to lead the Bahá'í Community Health Partnership (BCHP), living in a remote Indigenous region. Using Aidun’s diaries and interviews with him and other key participants, this new Biography traces the parallel stories of community health empowerment and Aidun’s personal healing, and the ripple effects of the BCHP a generation later. The panelists discuss the impact of the BCHP on their careers; developing a moral framework for social action; tensions between individual leadership and creating dependence; developing Indigenous partnerships while avoiding paternalism and proselytism; and the interplay between Bahá'í institutions and external funding.
Informed by the Promise of World Peace and founded in the centrality of peace i Bahá’u’llah’s revelation, the presentation will explore how peace is essential for health and that violence to manage conflict is unhealthy. It will examine the current increasing impact of war preparation on the current polycrisis. It will examine barriers and challenges. It will explore the role of the individual, the community and the institutions with a particular focus on the role of civil society. It will lead to a consultation as to how Baha’is might become more meaningfully involved. It will be of particular interest to those involved in health care but will be of interest to all who are concerned with the well-being of humanity.
