Research Leading to Solutions
Community-based work is full of challenges. Questions include:
- How to do it?
- What lessons have been learned?
- Is it effective?
- Are there key elements that contribute to successes ?
- How to sustain community programs and scale them up to the regional or national level ?
To answer these questions and offer replicable solutions, Future Generations reviews the global literature and case evidence, convenes international task forces to review the evidence, and conducts applied field-based research. Four topics are strategic areas of interest.
The Process of Change: Building on the results of two international task forces funded by UNICEF and the Rockefeller Foundation in the early 1990s, Future Generations hypothesizes that there are no universal solutions but there is a universal process to achieve sustainable and large-scale results among diverse communities worldwide.
Conservation: The Gordon and Bettye Moore Foundation commissioned Future Generations to conduct a global review of the scientific evidence relating to community-based conservation. This review builds on two decades of on-the-ground work to help protect 40 percent of the Tibet Autonomous Region through community-based approaches.
Child Health: Future Generations Professor of Equity and Empowerment in Health, Dr. Henry Perry, and Dr. Paul Freeman, a former student of the Future Generations Master's Degree program, are the co-chairs of a global Task Force on the Effectiveness of Community-Based Primary Health Care (CBPHC) in Improving Child Health. This task force is in its final stages of a systematic review of all the published and grey literature documenting the impacts of community-based primary health care approaches in improving child health. This work was supported initially by a small grant from the World Health Organization with additional support provided by UNICEF, the World Bank, Future Generations, and USAID (through the CORE Group).
Peace Building: With support from the Carnegie Corporation, Future Generations is documenting and reviewing the role of communities in peace building worldwide with special emphasis on large-scale and sustained results.
