105. Achieving the presence of at least one person from each family living in the community would represent a complete success.
106. Moreover, the different experiences we have studied have taught us that it is very important to involve children, given they are generally more willing to collaborate in community tasks. They tend to not be weighed down by the apathy present among those older than them as a result of years of unfulfilled promises. They are also the social sector that, once they return home from school, tends to spend the most time out in the community. As such, we feel that it would be a good idea to set the minimum age for voting in citizen’s assemblies at 12, rather than 16 or 18 as generally set out in existing voting laws.
107. One of the main problems this process of communitarian organization might face in places where it is carried out is that many people may fear that the government or political parties will manipulate the process, a fear often stoked up by interested factors. We have insisted on the need to avoid any political or other type of manipulation during the process of forming communal councils.
108. This is not about creating communal councils that involve only supporters of the government. All community institutions should be open to all citizens, no matter their political stripes. We can expect that many of those currently fooled by the media, seeing in practice the support they receive from higher levels of the government to resolve their community’s problems will discover the reality of the revolutionary process through their struggle.
h) A team to help initiate the process
109. The Venezuelan process has also shown that popular protagonism cannot be decreed from above, but neither can it appear simply as a result of willing it from below. Nor does it emerge from one day to the next. It requires a process of learning that brings together the willingness to achieve popular protagonism through a conscious process to build it.
110. This process will occur more quickly if the people receive support from a group of individuals, whether from the community or belonging to outside institutions that are trained in the area and have a broader perspective of the world.
111. These people could be members of a social, political or religious organization (we are thinking here of the grassroots Christian communities – comunidades cristianas de base – that played such an important role in Latin America) or a local government or institution willing to promote popular participation. However, regardless of their origin, their role should never be to substitute for the community. Instead they should facilitate the participation process, helping people discover their own potentialities. They should guide, point people in the right direction, save learning time by helping them avoid having to go through the process of trial and error, and learn together with the people by working with them.
i) Handing over financial resources to small projects
112. The participatory planning process12 can take a while to be implemented at the municipal and territorial levels, particularly as time is needed to train the various participants and to create a database, both of which are essential for planning. This delay could lead to demoralization as people begin to think that the process will ultimately go nowhere, and that it represents just another broken promise. That is why we believe it is important to take on board Chavez’s idea of handing over resources to communities so that they can carry out small projects. This should not be done in a populist manner in which funds are dispersed mainly to try to win political support for an upcoming election. Instead, communities should have to first organize themselves, come up with a community plan and, as part of this process, prioritize a project that could potentially be funded.
j) Small public works that had a big impact in Santa Tecla, San Salvador
113. A similar initiative, though this time at the municipal level, was implemented in the Salvadoran municipality of Santa Tecla13. While the participatory strategic municipal plan was being prepared, and faced with the need to provide concrete results, a decision was made to assign part of the funds designated to public works to projects the community was demanding (asphalt a street, fix up a school, provide adequate street lighting in a public square, etc.) These projects were referred to as “small projects with great impact” (POGI14). The idea emerged as a result of the need to demonstrate concrete results once the strategic plan had been developed and deal with the hundreds of demands emanating from residents.
114. Given that these small projects were of great interest to the population, and had been chosen by them, the community immediately began to identify with the larger project, involving itself in its execution and attempting to obtain resources over and above those it received from the mayor’s office, whether by digging into its own funds or seeking international aid. We should recall that during their heroic revolutionary war, the Salvadoran people won the sympathy and support of an enormous number of NGOs, many of which continue to provide support today.
115. This initiative helped break down the existing paternalistic culture. Its success lay in combining high levels of community participation with the decentralization of funds and their administration by organized residents. The municipal council at the time gave the community $1000, which they used to pay for inputs, contract labor and to administer the project overall. Once the project was completed, the community had to submit invoices and receipts to the major’s office in order to be able to participate in future projects.
116. The implementation of the project involved a cycle that began with the organization of a project committee, elected in a neighborhood assembly, which was to come up with a design for the project. Then it would make a formal request for funds from the mayor’s office, sign an agreement, get it approved and receive the funds. The next step was contracting the help required for carrying out the project, and then an evaluation of the project including its design and implementation.
117. While such a project was carried out, assemblies of neighbors were held to observe how the project was advancing and to continue raising funds. For its part, the mayor’s office provided technical support via the heads of its territorial, infrastructure and citizen’s participation departments. A regulation sets out the basic rules of the game for participants who are part of carrying out the project.
118. What is interesting is that there is no legal foundation for the decentralization of funds to citizens, yet this has not held back the government of Santa Tecla. Their argument has been that the municipal code does not contemplate this type of action, nor does it prohibit it. It is what we could call an “a-legal” initiative (neither legal nor illegal).
119. In Ecuador’s case, in municipalities such as Pedro Carbo, in the Guayas region, communities in the rural parishes have received funds for small projects via the participatory budgetary process. In the case of Santa Ana parish, in the Cuenca Canton, the parish board, headed by Julio Álvarez (2009-2014), decided to hand over between $3000 and $7000 to each community that made up the parish for community projects that local residents deemed to be a priority.15
k) If there is a shortage of resources, hold a community project-ideas competition
120. It may turn out that so many communities express their desire to organize themselves in order to receive resources that the mayor’s office will not have enough funds to cover them all. In this case, we propose organizing a competition in which the best project-ideas are granted the funds the mayor’s office has available.
121. Some have pointed out that this manner of distributing resources to communities could lead to injustices as resources will tend to end up in the hands of better organized communities with greater capacity to come up with projects, and not those that most need them. Without denying that this could happen in the short term, in the medium and long term the possible negative effect of granting resources this way should be offset by the positive impetus that this will give to the unorganized communities to become organized. Those that are not organized will have an incentive to overcome their situation, with the aim of obtaining resources in order to deal with their most pressing needs. This will be reinforced