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Community based initiatives
To empower and decide
Long term
Bottom-up
Empowerment
Medium - big group
About

Community-based initiatives are collective action processes that emerge from within communities. They are conceived, led, and managed by community members. These initiatives rely on local knowledge, trust-based relationships, and available resources to generate contextualised, inclusive, and sustainable responses to urban challenges.

This approach focuses on strengthening local capacities instead of depending on external interventions. It is grounded in values such as solidarity, autonomy, and democratic participation and promotes grassroots, collective-driven social transformation.

Benefits

  • They promote community ownership, collective initiative, and accountability by valuing local knowledge and lived experience. From these foundations, communities build relevant, grounded solutions that respond to their real needs.

  • They strengthen social bonds and collective capacity for action, leading to sustainable and scalable models. Rooted in community perspectives, these initiatives promote equity and social justice and lay the foundation for lasting transformation.

Importance

  • It promotes feminist organising, such as mutual aid, horizontal governance, and collective decision-making.

Community initiatives encourage equity, care, and shared responsibility. They challenge hierarchical structures and foster active participation. These practices strengthen social ties, redistribute power, and support change from a feminist perspective.

  • It enables communities to address intersectional issues—such as how climate change impacts vary by gender, class, or ethnicity—from within.

Rooted in the territory and daily experience, community action allows for analysing inequalities from a place-based perspective. This intersectional lens supports responses that address both structural and relational dynamics.

  • It supports just transitions by amplifying grassroots ecological practices and resistance.

Local initiatives are essential for testing fair and sustainable ways of living. By recovering traditional knowledge and collaborative practices, they promote more equitable and democratic socio-ecological transitions.

  • It creates spaces of belonging, safety, and visibility for historically excluded groups.

These initiatives provide community-based spaces for expression and organisation through participatory dynamics. They empower women, racialised communities, youth, and LGBTQ+ groups, strengthening their political agency.

Steps

  1. Identify community priorities using participatory methods to capture shared challenges, desires, and aspirations.

  2. Co-design objectives by defining goals together and how the initiative will operate.

  3. Mobilise resources and capacities by connecting skills, networks, and available support. Seek external backing if needed.

  4. Implement the plan by assigning tasks transparently and inclusively.

  5. Monitor and adapt using accessible mechanisms to track progress and adjust direction.

  6. Document and share the process to spread learning, show results, and inspire other initiatives.

Key Aspects

  • Promote participatory planning centred on community priorities.

Needs should be identified through participatory methods that reflect shared aspirations and challenges. This foundation allows for collaborative goal-setting and activity planning, strengthening commitment.

  • Strengthen local autonomy by mobilising internal resources.

Identifying and activating the community’s capacities, networks, and materials is key to building sustainable processes. When needed, external support should complement—not replace—the local initiative and must respect its leadership.

  • Ensure transparency, shared responsibility, and collective learning.

Clear and inclusive role assignment ensures fair implementation. To sustain the process, it’s important to set up simple monitoring, reflection, and adaptation mechanisms and to document lessons learned to inspire others.

Outcomes

  • They produce tangible impacts in specific contexts.

These projects are rooted in community needs and lead to relevant, sustainable local solutions.

  • They strengthen social cohesion and organisational capacity.

They build trust and collective structures for action by fostering leadership and community self-organisation,

  • They amplify marginalised voices and foster shared learning.

Active participation of historically excluded groups increases their public visibility. These processes also generate scalable practices that can inspire other territories and movements.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This website reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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