Glossary of Key Terms
We at the IDEA Association would like to take a minute to define some terms that we believe are integral to explaining our mission.
This word basically means an act of involving two or more academic, scientific, or artistic disciplines. Interdisciplinary community development means that we are developing standards and metrics to measure the 'interdisciplinarity' of our main activities: cultural event planning, participatory practices, and monitoring and evaluation systems. In other words, our activities can integrate larger and smaller amounts of lessons from relevant fields and disciplines. We believe that lessons from field experience in international development, cultural event organizing, monitoring and evaluation, and project design and implementation should actively be integrated into our strategies and methods for community development in order to qualify as an interdisciplinary organization.
We measure Development in terms of increases to human well-being, and increases in holistic community health. We have a zero tolerance policy toward projects that produce costs to human health and well-being.
We receive education in public spaces, at cultural events, mainly through: discussions, surveys, presentations, debates, art, and requiring people inform us extensively regarding what issues they want to organize around. We offer our understanding of best practices in the fields of Fundraising, Public Space Creation, Cultural Event Organizing, Project Design, and Monitoring and Evaluation. We offer these services in order to maximize the cost-effectiveness and positive impacts of the project, as well as sustainability, accountability and transparency of the projects we work on.
All throughout the life of any project, we prize Art for its role in bringing people together, and providing a type of expression that can deeply inspire individuals and communities into action. Art plays a major role in every Cultural Event we organize, and is central to our organizational culture.
In addition to the usual methods, we seek innovation in the field of Fundraising. We are planning to meticulously display the details of projects we are working on so that donors, funders, and the general public can connect their donations to specific needs of a project. This will create a degree of transparency that can enable donors to hold us extremely accountable for the use of funds.
We believe it is a necessity to create space that is open to the public in order to organize around any given issue. We create public space in two primary ways: collaborating with local organizations that have space to offer for Cultural Events; and our upcoming web space that will serve to invite and provide opportunities for the public to critique and improve the logic of our mission, strategy, project designs, monitoring systems and evaluations. Also, our web space will unveil a system to facilitate the connection of needs with resources, so that a project with certain needs can be matched with a person or group that has relevant resources to offer.
These events serve the following purposes: raising awareness that a community development project is underway that is both fueled and directed by public participation; providing a platform for various forms of Art; learning from community participants through discussions, surveys, voting procedures, and any other channel of communication in order to help develop a direction for the upcoming community project. (Further explanation coming soon).
A Project Design is the written document that represents the plans for action. Our Project Designs are centered around cost-effectiveness, rigorous logic, and well designed management systems so that we maximize positive impacts given the quantities and qualities of resources available to us. We believe that Fundraising is made easier when a Project Design meets the above criteria. The Participatory element of this means basically that we seek to maximize the power beneficiaries have over the major decisions in the design process, and the number of beneficiaries included in significant roles of the process. This helps maximize sustainability of the project, and is in line with our ethic of minimizing paternalistic exporting of arbitrary outsider planning. (Further explanation coming soon).
Given our belief that development projects are often designed and implemented without decent Monitoring systems, and are rarely Evaluated in a way that reflects best practices in the field, we place enormous value on these elements of our mission. Before the completion of any Project Design we require rigorous monitoring and evaluation systems to be in place. Without these, cost-effectiveness, sustainability, transparency, and accountability for us and the project are seriously jeopardized. (Further explanation coming soon).