The work of community organizing is very dynamic, authentic, and wouldn’t work without the people in the community. People in the community are the essence of this work, specially in more socially excluded communities.

The principle of community organizing is built on the idea that people, not the system, should solve their own problems. However, the ultimate goal is not that all problems in communities are solved, but that individual members who often struggle to provide for basic needs realise that they have the power to change their lives. However, there is a need to be proactive, and that is where the principle and tool of community organizing comes in.

In designing this learning project, we have mainly drawn on the basic methodology of community organizing that is commonly applied for experienced community workers. This time, however, we focused on the members of the communities in which we work (Banská Štiavnica, Banská Bystrica and Slovenská Ľupča).

The Community Organizing Centre has been implementing the community organizing tool for almost 25 years in different parts of Slovakia.
In recent years, however, our work has become more concentrated on excluded, mainly Roma communities because we feel that in these communities no one is working with individual members as full citizens, but rather as a burden to be referred to the system and its services.
Thus, in designing, we have mainly focused on adhering to the principle of community organizing, but targeted for community leaders with an emphasis on new trends in community work.

We wanted to make sure that at the end of the learning activity we had people who are from inside the community and are more active and more interested in the problems and solutions in their communities, but at the same time we wanted to build better relationships with them based on trust and respect so that it would help us in further community work from a long term perception.