Alistar International’s Strategy Definition
Alistar International accomplishes its mission through four strategies and primary activities in its field programs.
Empowerment:
To empower is to provide means and opportunities for others to live with dignity. In this sense, Alistar International’s focus on empowerment involves returning authority, power, and strength to communities and the regional territories enabling them to manage and govern their own social entities and institutions, and natural resources of their local environments. Alistar works to facilitate connections between communities and regions often isolated from power and social resources and the larger governing political institutions. In addition to this, we work to attain a “seat at the table” of national decision making and governance for marginalized and isolated peoples; Alistar helps to make voices heard. Similarly, we focus on legalizing land tenure for traditional and indigenous communities. Alistar International has learned that empowerment can only flourish through the assistance and facilitation of social institutions and capacity building that help local people to formulate and carry out their own activities, agendas and plans for their future. Also, Alistar recognizes that newly empowered people are a threat to established societal relationships and power structures.
Technical Assistance:
Alistar offers some forms of technical assistance that are geared to the needs and requests of the local communities and community members. Specifically, we tend to focus on administrative and accounting training, scientific research, technology assistance, analysis and monitoring of social and environmental programs, management planning, training for planning and carrying out community agendas and priorities, indigenous ancestral land titling and documentation (GIS, GPS), and alternative economic programs.
Training:
In our field programs, we offer training in diverse areas of community and individual capacity and institution building. Of greatest emphasis, however, is Alistar’s interest in training local community members and leaders to be their own trainers and teachers for achieving local agendas and priorities.
Applied Science (both Western and Indigenous)
Alistar works toward building on traditional and indigenous knowledge. Through the melding of both indigenous and Western science, Alistar helps to forward a science of the phenomena of the natural and social world that can be a context for such activities as: calculating regional natural resource sustainability and carrying capacity, documenting traditional medicine, wildlife and botanical knowledge, monitoring wildlife species, and maintaining and promoting regional species diversification. All these activities are undertaken with the primary purpose of promoting local ownership and authority of community and environmental sustainability.
Applied Science is a particularly important part of Alistar’s programs as it is an appropriate context for training, education, and the promotion of local natural resource management. In this sense, Alistar works to further educational opportunities for advanced scholarship and profession in the sciences that is appropriate for local and regional situations.