Our experience: from an institutional project to a universal model

The context

It is obvious to everyone that the positive results obtained through the overall growth and development of our country have not been distributed fairly among the different sectors and social groups that historically make it up. It is equally obvious, and it goes without saying, that in such a context vast human groups, ever more numerous, in the Colombian countryside and cities have been left outside the fulfilment of their natural vital expectations of material, affective, social and cultural well-being.

In our country, the demographic, socio-economic and political transformations of the last fifty years have radically altered the living conditions of the population, affecting to a large extent the traditional structure and functioning of the family group. The rate of deprivation and risk has thereby increased for a broad section of the population, for which the family — that nucleus of social production and reproduction par excellence — represented the only and last reliable space of protection and subsistence.

Although the multiple and recursive ways in which the family responds to the want of poverty are well known in our milieu, this has not led us naively to believe that, in the majority of cases, these family groups manage, on their own, to meet in any significant way the indispensable material, social and cultural needs of their members, or to fulfil the functions that are properly theirs within the community context.

With the aim of restoring, in some cases, and of establishing, in others, a positive tendency towards balance between the conditions of the context and the endangered family unit, in the poor and extremely poor working-class sectors, where such imbalances are the most deleterious and the most damaging, the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare has for several years now been carrying out certain institutional projects and programmes intended to optimise the family’s capacity to fulfil the productive and reproductive functions that are indispensable both to the satisfaction of its members’ basic needs and to general social development.

Among these programmes and projects, one in particular offered the conditions to become, going beyond institutional limits, the true vanguard of a deep process of prevention and promotion of family health.

This was the Family Information and Education Project, designed and implemented as a set of integrated educational actions in the legal and psychosocial fields, in health and nutrition, in human sexuality and responsible procreation, according to its initial formulation at national level. From the outset this project sought to encourage the analysis of family problems and the joint search for viable alternatives for acting upon them, given the available resources. What was at stake, in the last instance, was to bring about a broad and effective community participation in the understanding and the resolution of the conflicts and difficulties that are common to all.

In the Bolívar regional office, this project became the starting point from which a multi- and interdisciplinary team, the Cartagena Group — made up of independent professionals or staff of social service institutions and of members of the community —, has in recent years deployed a genuine educational strategy of primary prevention, which intends to become a model of preventive intervention for family health.

Put very summarily, the Family Information and Education Project, which served as the base for the present state of the model of our educational strategy of primary prevention, today carried out with the Family Education Groups, was the bed in which we developed a particular conceptual, methodological and experiential body of work, oriented towards the recognition and the joint assumption of the commitments and the resources of the groups involved. The educational agents as well as the participants in this strategy have shared, within the working groups, expectations, knowledge and lived experience that have allowed them to interact in a more positive and more effective way in the family and social environment that concerns them. For the whole process, from its very beginnings, has been oriented towards this: that its participants — young people, couples, fathers and mothers, members of formal and informal groups in the community — should become genuine agents of the improvement and the well-being of the family organisation and, through its mediation, of the community, with a particular emphasis on the protection and the integral care of the child, the crucial point of the system, the element most exposed to the high material and social risks that characterise the average context of our intervention.

In the course of such an evolution, it has thus been possible for us to develop the conceptual, methodological and empirical lines of the educational strategy, through a particular teaching-learning process implemented with the Family Education Groups. These groups today constitute the informal organisational structure that is the seat of the development of the said strategy of primary prevention. It is therefore with them that we are pushing to their broadest and deepest consequences the germinal orientations of the initial project outlined above.

Through the educational strategy developed with the Family Education Groups, what we are seeking is that individuals — not as isolated entities, but as members functioning within family systems, systems themselves immersed in social contexts with which they maintain correlative mutual implications — should come to draw a real and lasting benefit from their own experiences and from those of others, in such a way that the obstacles, the difficulties and the frustrations they face in their daily lives — and the particular ways in which they have approached them — serve as a starting point and a spur for their own reflection and for that of others, who are living, have lived or may live through similar circumstances. And that this reflection should set out from the real processes of life, family and group processes, and reach them, preventively and therapeutically.

The particular relation between theory and experience lies at the root of the practical and conceptual growth of the educational strategy with the family education groups

Starting points

The specific characteristics of our work with the community, with the family and with the individual have allowed us, at the same time as we practised our profession, to set out on the path of building a model for intervening with them.

The starting point and the aims of our work at these different levels may be regarded as taking concrete shape in an integral educational strategy of primary prevention. A strategy that takes body in a teaching-learning process characterised, precisely, by a particular correlation between theory and experience, a correlation that lies at the root of its evolution and of its empirical and conceptual progress.

A rich experience, a constant evaluation of it and a sincere and fruitful re-evaluation of some of its theoretical and methodological presuppositions and of its practical procedures, together with a constant confrontation with conceptions and experiences homologous to our own, found and justify the ongoing movement of elaboration and re-elaboration in which we are engaged, and whose results in turn feed back into practice itself, a practice that becomes the starting point and the spur for new processes of conceptual and methodological re-elaboration and re-evaluation, in a progressive unfolding that has no wish to stop.

It must be stressed that, in this reciprocal interplay, the discoveries, the syntheses and the alternative paths have been and still are made possible, on the community’s side, by the arousing of a common sense of responsibility in the face of a conflictual reality that is nonetheless full of actual and virtual riches; and, on the side of the educational agents, professionals and staff involved in the strategy, by their non-hierarchical but unconditional, symmetrical, direct and reciprocal bond with the community, the family and the individual.

Some methodological principles

Our educational strategy of primary prevention, put into practice with the Family Education Groups, rests on a methodology of non-formal interpersonal education in which, through their active and mutually involving participation, the participants and the educational agents alike diagnose lived situations, look for alternative solutions to their needs and propose effective ways of reaching those solutions.

In general terms, a fundamental methodological principle, at which we have arrived through our working experience as well as through reflection on and evaluation of its results, is the following: any knowledge, any skill acquired by people will be all the more effectively grasped and internalised the more it holds for them a concrete, practical meaning. For what is at stake, in the last instance, with a strategy of this kind, is not so much obtaining new knowledge as effectively bringing about new behaviours, in the breadth and the complexity of family life. And this is because the greater the real impact, the greater the fixing of alternative conceptions and ways of operating. Consequently, what this strategy seeks, methodologically and materially, is to share with the participants elements of experimentation and analysis that at the same time allow them an open and constant learning, translating into optimal ways of concretely facing the problems that arise for them each day. A concrete impact that, at the same time and in a progressive and systematic way, will interest people more and more in acquiring elements of knowledge related to the problems that daily life sets them.

A description, on a few key points, of the elements of the process of transformation undergone over several years, through which we have come to conceive and to implement, in its present state of growth, the teaching-learning process that is the axis of our educational strategy with the Family Education Groups, will allow us to sketch out for you the way in which we have built a theoretical model out of a particular experience. An open and perfectible model of an educational strategy of primary prevention that aims at the promotion of the health of the family group and, through its mediation, at the promotion of community well-being and health.

We shall do so by setting out below, in their most general and most significant lines, the points of access we have reached through this constant interplay of mutual feedback between experience and reflection, between community reality and professional work, between the educational agent and the participants of the Family Education Groups.

But before coming to that, it is important to stress that our educational strategy of primary prevention conceives of education as an eminently preventive process of a social character, centred on the family group, through which the human and material resources of the community are potentialised in the direction of the promotion and the development of well-being and integral health. This is sought through the active and conscious participation of individuals, considered as members of both families and communities, within a particular teaching-learning process intended to facilitate the analysis of family problems and to provide tools for acting upon them, starting from the real interests of people considered in context.

Along these lines, the main phases and the main results of the evolution of our strategy as put into practice with the Family Education Groups may be presented as follows.

Some methodological advances