We Teach community

We TeachCommunity Development is the process of empowerment. This takes time, but results are profound and long lasting. Community development encourages poor farmers to take ownership of their own problems, and gives them the confidence to apply solutions.
At Floresta, teaching takes many forms. Floresta teaches sustainable agriculture and business skills as well as offering Biblical teaching. But when the Floresta mission statement says “We Teach,” perhaps the most important teaching involves teaching communities to solve many of their own problems. This is known as community development.
Community development is the process of helping farmers to take responsibility for their own problems and to work together to find solutions for them. Many community members see an organization like Floresta and expect handouts and or to be given something. In many places people see themselves as helpless and may have developed a welfare mentality. Community development gets beyond this.
This is very graphically illustrated by the experience we have had in the village of Kavanac in Haiti . The first time Floresta staff visited Kavanac in 1998 ago, about fifty farmers attended the community meeting. A woman there stood up and said, “Another organization was here. They gave us food and left. She went on to list several others. So and so was here. They gave us things and left. A third organization was here and gave us stuff, then left. How are you going to be any different!?”
Floresta told her, “First of all we are not going to give you anything. Secondly we are not going to leave until you are ready for us to.”
Several years later in another meeting in Kavanac, a different woman stood up and excitedly shared, “What Floresta has given us is the knowledge that we are not helpless. That God has given us talents that we can use to improve our own situation!”
And Kavanac has begun to improve their situation. They have formed a credit cooperative, which has made and collected hundreds of small business loans, they have planted thousands of trees, they have improved their crop yields and they have learned to work together. Later that evening, after the meeting, a couple of the men shared that they considered the work of Floresta to be an incredible miracle from God. They wanted to give back, so a number of them had donated a portion of their profits to start a fund to build the first church in the community.
This is what Floresta means when we talk about community development. It can take a long time to get started, but it means that the work will continue long after Floresta is gone! That is fundamental to all the teaching that follows.