Raft and Ripple Modal on Collective Community Actions for Health Promotion

Abstract

A community-based health promotion project was piloted in Sri Lanka, aiming to improve the growth and development of children below 5 years from 2010 to 2012 by Plan Sri Lanka in collaboration with Foundation for Health Promotion, Ministry of Health, and Rajarata University of Sri Lanka. The project covered over a 100 community settings with an approximate population of 100,000 in 2000 families. The project was facilitated by a team of grass root level healthcare workers and facilitators from the foundation for health promotion. Small group discussions with mothers of children under 5 years of age aimed at initiating collective community actions sustained by self-monitoring mechanisms that proved their effectiveness at setting level. This study is the process evaluation component of the project evaluation conducted in 2012. Focus group discussions, key informant interviews, in-depth interviews, observations, and narratives were used to collect data until the information saturation point is reached. Data were analyzed using a constant comparative analysis method to model the process. The emphasis of this model was on promoting Collective Community Action, a process in which members become engaged in social transformation with greater enthusiasm, knowledge, and skills to affect change in their communities. The inputs, the process, and the generation of collective community actions can be conceptualized by the “raft and ripple model” described in this paper.