Awareness Raising

A strategy used by several development projects to increase their self-sustainability is to raise public awareness on the importance of the problems they are tackling and the pertinence of the solutions they suggest.  

Awareness raising is an effort to create conditions in which people are more likely to support a development initiative, or to collectively move towards solving a social problem –or at least not making it worse. If an initiative supports a farming community, for instance, perhaps part of its work will be promoting the benefits of locally sourced food in nearby towns, and to raise people’s awareness of the negative effects of large-scale food production. 

This strategy helps an initiative’s self-sustainability because people do not necessarily know or understand the dimension of the problem at hand, so when they do actually get this information, they often start contributing with ideas, engagement, political support, voluntary contributions or economic resources. Awareness raising helps diversify a project’s sources of support and thus reduce its dependence on one or a few sources of funding, which allows it to better negotiate its interests and ways of working to achieve solutions that are more comprehensive and relevant to more people. Moreover, when a development problem is addressed not only at the local level but also at the global level, important obstacles to the projects’ long-term impact may be removed: if we all take care of the environment, for instance, the positive consequences will benefit all local development projects that fight against the effects of climate change. 

That is why some projects gear efforts towards raising awareness among society at large or among certain sectors related to their target communities or problems by organizing campaigns, demonstrations or talks in schools or fairs, preparing events, concerts or marathons, disseminating research, offering training or workshops, or spreading their message through social media, through celebrities working as their ambassadors, etc. Others create demonstration models or pilot projects that show the importance of their target problems and of their own interventions, as well as the potential impact that scaling or replicating them could have. And still others focus on reaching decision-makers and advocating for laws or public policies that may create a path to solving problems in the long term.

When initiatives engage in these efforts, many seek to be clear about their objectives, ways of working and the results they have already achieved to show that things can change, and sometimes even to promote emotional bonds between participants and beneficiary populations so that, seeing the potential impact their support could have on other people’s lives, they feel encouraged to collaborate.