The Project
The PaMoja Project is a social and politically minded endeavour that accompanies NGOs, institutions, and communities working to advance community led social and political change through civic action and solidarity building.
We believe that there is no such thing as the powerless. Like the civil rights activists Ella Baker, we believe that “strong people do not need strong leaders”. All peoples are intrinsically powerful and our work aims to co-create space for the deepening and expansion of that power. We do not believe that communities are voiceless. We believe that as the writer Arundhati Roy says, “there are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard”. We are here to support the magnification of the voices that matter. It is from these standpoints that we engage our work.
Our focus and approach emerged out of consistent encounters with the limits of electoral democracy, top down policy, and conventional approaches to “development” that frame peoples and communities as objects to be improved and worked upon.We work at these limits by promoting new thinking, action, approaches and policy. We bring our cumulative strengths, experience, and insight to the table as equal co-conspirators in transformative processes. As a project, we are consistently refining, revising, and rethinking our approach to accompaniment. We root our approach to working with clients, communities, and citizens in liberatory and decolonizing traditions. We are a project because learning to work in this way requires constant reflection, reflexivity, and a willingness to be challenged and changed by our encounters with the peoples we work with and the places we work within. We aim to walk behind and beside not in front or ahead. We do not preach, teach, or direct. Instead, we accompany and co-conspire.
Accompany & co-conspire
Our approach to working with peoples, communities, and organizations reflect our core values. We use accompaniment and conspiring because these words are containers for a number of key engagement principles we utilize and apply to all of our work:
Listening & Learning
Listening is an art and one of the most transformative elements of our accompaniment process. We bring story telling technology, psychological methods, and a commitment to reflexivity to our work. We want to hear the things you haven’t heard and need to. We employ deep listening strategies and aim to leave these strategies and tools behind so they may be put in service of solidarity building and collective action work you are engaged in.
Collaboration & Co-Creation
We place emphasis on making sure everyone has a “seat at the table”. Imagining, co-conspiring, and planning together is powerful. We are committed to magnifying the most marginalized, underutilized, and overlooked voices and experiences in our process. Deep systemic change cannot happen otherwise.
Creativity & Freedom
We aim to liberate processes from the confines of conventional approaches to project management, research, and policy design while maintaining rigour and quality. The world that we live in needs new thinking. New thinking requires innovative approaches and creative processes. We bring arts based methods and innovative inquiry approaches into all of our work. Our aim is to tap into all facets of the people, organizations, and communities we walk alongside.