Making the Most of Diversity

Many initiatives leverage and promote diversity in their participants, in their collaborations or in their resources to design and implement interventions in the most self-sustainable way possible.

Initiatives are often better able to spot obstacles related to their target problems when more points of view are engaged, which also helps them come up with ways to address them in a manner that is comprehensive and relevant to more people. By diversifying its sources of support and resources, a project can cover more aspects related to the development problem at hand while relying less on each individual source of support.

Some initiatives design participation mechanisms to make the most of their stakeholders’ diversity of profiles and experiences in order to design, manage, evaluate or adapt their interventions in a way that is relevant to all (participatory diagnosis dynamics, rating systems, shared management schemes, congresses, rotating administrations, etc.). Some do this by establishing participation quotas –in terms of gender or nationality, for example– to ensure that different interests and needs are well represented, including those of traditionally marginalized groups. Others do this by leveraging a diversity of knowledge and ways of working to make their projects more relevant to their contexts, such as educational projects that use an intercultural education model that recognizes and fosters both global and local knowledge.

In addition, many initiatives diversify channels to attract the support and participation of different populations through different means: they give conferences in schools to attract kids, increase their presence in social media to involve young people, collaborate with bridge builders (local organizations or leaders, for example) to better communicate with the communities they work with, show their portfolios to companies to get their economic support, create varied schemes and mechanisms to encourage different stakeholders to contribute (online donations, street fundraising, volunteer programs), etc. Others work by creating or coordinating collaborative networks to solve common problems (networks that include different experts, volunteers or even other initiatives), leveraging and also ensuring the diversity of participants in order to cover more areas related to the problem at hand. Collaborative networks (such as barter systems or alternative currencies, or even academic networks of multidisciplinary work) carry with them knowledge, influences, contacts, experience and resources that can support their causes. 

Some initiatives find different collaborations that might help them create an integrated service delivery model that may cover areas such as health, education, environment, and others, to address their target population’s problems in an increasingly holistic and systemic way.