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1. Executive Summary Our team, Group B of the 50th IATSS Forum consist of seven people from different countries: Nuny (Laos), Fei (Malaysia), Bo (Thailand), Thanda (Myanmar), Muni (Cambodia), Bob (Japan) and Rambo (Indonesia). Our group name is Hungry, Hurry and Happy team. Our group theme study is sustainable community design and our theme is â€Å"A Clean Community Starting from US†, with the project name â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children and Art†. Our team mascot is â€Å"Mr. Bin† an icon to showcase the importance of keeping public spaces clean. Having gone through a brainstorming session and overview of each of our members respective communities and with the priority rating matrix based on three consideration factors of impact to community, urgency to solve and applicability to other communities, we decide to focus our project in Vientiane, Laos, specifically in Ban Sengsavang Village. The project location is a neighborhood area with population of approximately 4,000 people. We have also assessed the current situation through interviews with Nuny, participant from Laos who lives in Ban Sengsavang village; he explained the current situation as well as problem regarding waste and garbage issue in his hometown. Lack of collective awareness from the public to maintain their area is the main issue here. By looking to the mention issue, we have decided on our Principle which is to create healthy environment for happy and helpful community. We have also agreed upon three objectives stated in this report and agreed to state the problem as garbage in public spaces. To improve the current situation and eradicate the problem of garbage in Ban Sengsavang village, we have clarified Problem, Causes and Effects. Through an intensive and thorough discussion, we have come up with four specific causes of the current problem, which are also stated in this report. These causes are also triggering several future problems such as disease and uncomfortable environment for the people. Having discussed and selected specific causes of garbage problem, we brainstormed ideas on how to eradicate and minimize this problem through a grass root approach. We have decided to go with the idea of facilitating the local community leaders and to make a project of artwork competition using garbage to create campaign message to raise the cleanliness awareness within the community. For this project, we will target teachers and students in Ban Sengsavang Primary School involving several stakeholders such as IATSS Laos Alumni, school principal and teachers, local village chief and leaders, with the timeline of two years for the project. We have formulated a 10-step approach to facilitate the creation of this local community to initiate the art competition and we have also decided the budget to run this pilot project. At the final part of this report, we included the lesson learnt and difficulties during the overall discussion among team members. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 1 2. Introduction and Background 2. 1 Introduction The Hungry Hurry Happy (HHH) group study members of the 50th IATSS Forum are formed with participants from Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Cambodia and Japan. Our group theme study will focus on sustainable community design and the chosen project location will be Ban Sengsavang, Vientiane, Laos. In this project, our group will look into addressing the issue of garbage in public spaces through the introduction of a grass root approach on how the community can take initiative and ownership to achieve the bigger goal to support their community to live in a clean, healthy, happy and helpful place. This report will illustrate the process of problem assessment and clarifying key factors, principle and objectives, ideas formation, and a planned approach to inspire the community to initiate and sustain the community design project. 2. 2 Background Garbage is a commonly known issue in developing countries and historically it has shown that garbage in large scale will certainly affect many aspects of a community and subsequently the progress in country development. The project location will be in Ban Sengsavang village, Vientiane, Laos, the area is a scale of 213 hectares with a population of 4,126 divided between 2,407 female and 1,719 male total up to 792 household in the village. This is considered a smaller scale village compared to other surrounding district. The village is equipped with public facilities including a market in the center of the village with a main road leading to the city center, surrounded by residential neighborhood and local commercial area. From the market, a pagoda is located to the north east and to the further north a primary school; on the southwest is where the police station and police residence located; these facilities are the vine of the village activities and livelihood of the people. The community comprise primarily of students at 32. 42. %, labor workforce at 27. 11%, government officers at 8. 52%, merchants 7. 37%, employees 6. 98% and at 17. 6% including housewives, retirees and others. In relation to the garbage issue, in Ban Sengsavang village, the main characteristics of the garbage comes from residential, shops, market, office, clinic, school and many different spaces but the most immediate problem is the common public space where the community is not collectively aware on how the growing garbage pile up from their actions would affect their daily life in the long run without proper management. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 2 2. 3 General Overview In this section, we will illustrate how a community is able to come together and systematically implement steps to achieve a sustainable community design. Firstly, it is important for the community to assess and understand the needs of their own community; identify and empower key leaders and coordinators who will be able to steer the plan to implement a sustainable project that will move the community towards the big picture of an ideal community that they have envisioned. The ideal community concept can be constructed based on assessments and information gathered from the community which they have envisioned. From here on, the community would be able to look at the current situation and issues from the future point of view and plan for projects to deal with the current situation which leads to the bigger picture instead of a short sighted solution. The next stage is where they can involve and empower various stakeholders and community to participate and finally implement the project. Based on the current situation in Ban Sengsavang village, we have interviewed and discussed in detail with our group member from Laos, Nuny (Mr. Vongsomphou Souttha) to assess and understand the problems and needs within his community. Consecutively with the information, our group is able to focus on the specific topic of garbage in public spaces – which is a growing problem within the village. This also enables us to help envision an idea of a clean community where, as citizen, Nuny would like to live in. Our group then assessed the current problem of garbage in public spaces focusing on both the negative (undesirable situation) and positive (desirable situation) factors as summarized below. Undesirable Situation Garbage disposal around the public spaces is a chronic problem to be concerned There are no public trash provided by the municipal in public places The low frequency of trash collection within the village is only once a week Ignorance of business owners to maintain the facilities cleanliness accelerates the public spaces being used as dump site Potential spread of disease due to rats and other rodents which may be potential carrier of disease There is significantly low awareness on community cleanliness and community public space ownership Desirable Situation Every Saturday, there is a mandate where the community will need to clean up the public spaces however it is important to note that this is a top-down approach from the government to the citizen The community has awareness regarding cleanliness but only limited to individual home and private spaces Cleanliness is one of the policy for the development of the village and cities which means there is also an obligation for the community to follow The scale of the village area and number of household in the community is manageable for the team to initiate the project â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 3 The reason for this assessment is to identify the preliminary causes and effects which are undesirable for the community due to the problem of garbage in public spaces. At the same time, it is also important to look at the positive and desirable factor of the current situation as this will maximize how community design project can be implemented based on the strength and local resources of the community. 3. Action Plan 3. 1 Principle The birth of the project idea for Ban Sengsavang village is based out of an ideal clean community concept focusing on cleanliness and hygiene. The rationale behind the principle is to be the baseline in order to motivate people to take actions for them to achieve the goal. Based on the current situation, we would like to narrow down the gap between desirable future and undesirable future in the community: â€Å"To create a Healthy environment for a Happy and Helpful Community† Healthy Environment: A healthy environment is a clean and hygiene neighborhood where people live in and it is important the community for their participation in economic and social activities without compromising the impact of disease therefore achieving a high quality living standard. Happy and Helpful Community: A happy and helpful community is comprised of individual who benefits from the emotional satisfaction through sense of belonging in the community and, therefore, they are helpful in making their community even better. If we are healthy, then we are happy and helpful therefore we are able to achieve in making our community better to live in. 3. 2 Objectives Based on the principle as our guide, our group set out three main long-term objectives which we believe is important towards achieving the ideal clean community that we have envisioned. Further to that, we have also set objectives specifically for the project that will be implemented in the community. Long-term objectives 1. To share the knowledge with the community about consequences of unhealthy environment and benefits of clean environment Through knowledge sharing, we anticipate that the community will be much more educated and aware of the consequences of their actions if they do not participate in ensuring a clean public space in the long run. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 4 2. To raise the collective awareness of the community to achieve clean public space A community with collective awareness on clean public space will be more aware of their living space and the surrounding area which leads to a long term maintenance of the clean public places too. 3. To inspire the community to be role model for other communities An inspired community is a community who has sense of belonging and is proud to be part of the community. Therefore, they will continue with their positive action of being helpful to ensure the public space is clean which will subsequently inspired the other communities to follow the same. 3. 3 Background of Target Area Ban Sengsavang primary school is a public school, located in northern area of Ban Sengsavang village, Saysettha district, Vientiane, Lao P. D. R. The school has nine rooms in total. Five rooms are classrooms for student from Grade 1 to Grade 5. Another three rooms are administration offices and teachers room and one library. At the school, there are six teachers and 109 students in the school. The school also includes Teacher- Parents Committee to discuss about the students’ learning and progress. Most children from Ban Sengsavang village go to Ban Sengsavang primary school due convenience and ease with reasonable tuition fee. Only few children go to private schools located in different villages. In general, students who completed their primary school go to secondary school in the central part of Vientiane for their further study. For the national education system, the first semester commences on September 1st and ends in the middle of January while the second semester commence on February 1st and ends at the end of May. The school time starts at 8:00 in the morning with a break at 11:30a. m. The lesson resumes at 1:00 pm in the afternoon and finish at 4:00pm. Every Monday morning, there is flag raising and national anthem singing session. Environmental cleanliness is one of the national level education policies and there is a competition between schools from villages focusing on achieving three areas as follows: 1. School examination result 2. Free from drug, alcohol and violence 3. Cleanliness In line with this policy, the students have to clean their classroom every morning before learning. The students have to take turn the responsibility to clean by group. The students also have to clean the school compound every Friday. It is a good opportunity to integrate the project activities with the school. The students have already knowledge and practice to clean their classroom and school compound. Therefore, it will be a good starting point for the project training students to create messages about their own community. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 5 3. 4 Problems, Causes and Effects Figure 1: Problem, Causes, Sub Causes and Effects The garbage in the public area is an issue in Ban Sengsavang village, Laos that raises a concern and leads to this project plan. Despite the Red Saturday, which is a government mandate to clean public space together every Saturday, we still can find garbage in the public area rest of the week. The following causes, sub-causes and effects exemplifies the problem and show the need for action to be taken. 3. 4. 1 Cause: Low collective awareness to clean the public space This cause is divided into 4 sub-causes to identify how the collective awareness is low regarding the cleanliness of the public space where residences commute and pass by every day. a. Lack of hygiene education: The lack of access to hygiene education has resulted into residence taking care of only the private spaces and not knowing the other areas are equally important. The public space is where everyone people can access get more concentration of disease spreading to other places. b. Low sense of public ownership: When we think we do not own the public space, we seem to lack of responsibility and shift the responsibility around and of course, to the government. This idea shows the unwillingness to clean public space where it supposed to be everyone’s responsibility. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 6 c. Self-centered clean attitude: The residence tends to focus only on their house’s cleanliness and not the public space. Their attitude â€Å"my house’s cleanliness is more important, why I should care about public area? Others will take care of this†. This attitude of self-centered and passing around the responsibility makes the public spaces vulnerable to the inconsiderate human actions. d. No regular meeting between residences: The community rarely interacts closely with each other; summon for meeting is a hard task to fulfill as they are busy to earn a living. Even though they do have some complaints, they rarely have meeting to raise the issue to be addressed. 3. 4. 2 No public trash can available If we have a tour around Ban Sengsavang village, to our surprise, we find no public trash can available in the area. Below are the sub causes: a. No support from the government sector: The government does not provide any trash can along the side walk where commuters cannot find place to dump the trash. In this case, the communities may feel they are left out to be taken care by their government where they would naturally assumed the government should be the one who support this kind of facility. b. No support from the private sector: Despite the government concentration, the private sector seems to be neglect of providing the trash can at their business place such as the market or shop. This leads to slow development and growth in their business and the community as a whole. c. Lack of initiative to make public trash can: Without depending on the government and private sector of the trash can, the residence themselves is lack of initiative idea to make their own public trash can for their community. Therefore, it is still an issue of having no sufficient disposal spot for the garbage in the village. 3. 4. 3 Garbage collecting system In Laos, not just in Ban Sengsavang village, the garbage collection system is considered to be a critical issue to address:a. Cleaning fee: is fixed by the government. The residence with poor living condition cannot afford to pay the fee, given no choice they resort to burning the garbage which pollutes the environment and causes health issue from the fumes. b. Low frequency of rubbish collection: The rubbish collection in the village is conducted every once a week. With such low frequency of collection, the smell and disease could possibly spread faster c. No cleaning service personnel available: The rubbish collection system in Laos is through government and as the resources are limited, cleaning staff in the public area cannot be found. With limited personnel and services, it shows the low quality of cleaning service in the country. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 7 d. Insufficient fund from the government: The government funds to support and manages rubbish collection system lacks prioritization and it becomes an issue of disorganized waste management system in the country as a whole and in Ban Sengsavang village as a small example. 3. 4. 4 Limited knowledge on waste management The condition, issues and problem of urban garbage management in developing country like Laos and in areas like Ban Sengsavang village specifically is insufficient in dealing with garbage issues. The following sub-causes indicate of how the waste management in Ban Sengsavang village is: a. Low priority in the government agenda: The waste management issue is not a prioritized issue in the government agenda to be addressed promptly. In this regard, it might take longer time for action to be taken from the government side. b. Lack of effective campaign: To be aware of waste management, effective campaign should be conducted. However, it is difficult to have one organized for the community to get sufficient information regarding the waste management. c. No basic education on waste issue: Certain type of garage can be reused and useful for other purpose. However, the community tends to throw everything without considering its usefulness and how to reuse it. With limited information and knowledge about waste management, people have no encouragement in changing their mindset and attitudes towards environment. d. Lack of support from NGO: Besides waiting from the government side, the NGOs seem to take little action in the regard of the garbage in the public area. Without the support, people would lack of opportunity to learn the know-how on waste management from NGOs as they are well known to have more skills, training and knowledge providers. 3. 4. 5 Community habit toward waste management Despite the above causes, the community has no motivation or encouragement toward the urban waste management in the village. One of the reasons is that there is No role model in the community for them to follow. We believe that role model can inspire the change in the community. 3. 4. 6 No interest from the business owner From private sector perspective, they have no interest of taking part in managing the garbage even in their business coverage as a. To business owners it is No profit to the business, but to invest money on it. This is a short sight viewpoint in term of unsuccessful business. With this idea in mind, it shows the sense of no participation to contribute to the neither community cleanliness nor health care especially their own successful business in a long term. b. They feel as a burden for their business as it is kind of waste money and it’s not their responsibility, but the government’s. This mindset will affect their business from time to time because customers will lose confidence of their business especially the management in garbage which is also hygiene for the community. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 8 c. Bandwagon effect: People tend to follow others action without reason of doing it and forget to consider about its effect for neither their own interests nor public interests. This effect will escalate the situation of the garbage in the public area. With the above mentioned sub-causes, we selected those that we believe is applicable for a sustainable community design approach from the grass-root level. 3. 4. 1. a Lack of hygiene education? Spread of disease 3. 4. 1. b Low sense of public ownership ? Unwillingness to clean the public space 3. 4. 2. c Lack of initiative to make public trash can ? No sufficient disposal spot for garbage 3. 4. 3. b Low frequency of rubbish collection? Rubbish becomes smelly 3. 4. 4. b Lack of effective campaign ? Insufficient information on waste management 3. 4. 4. c No basic education on waste issue ? No mindset on public waste issue 3. 5 Clarifying Key Factors After analyzing problem, causes and effect, we are able to clarify key factors that create gap between desirable future and undesirable future. We found that the community has less opportunity to cultivate the habit of keeping the public spaces clean because 1) there is limited education and campaign on cleanliness and hygiene and 2) there is a lack of facilities and insufficient waste management in the area. Our group came up with various ideas to tackle those problems. The ideas are as follow: 1. Identifying Community Leaders: We have to identify key actor for taking the lead on projects. At the initial stage, we recognize that there is a village head and group heads who are leaders of the small groups in the village. During the process, we will identify, observe and talk to key peoples to integrate them to join and take lead on our project. We will position ourselves as the facilitator or the observer as we want the community to initiate activities on their own in order to create sustainable community. We can motivate these key persons to join our project by pointing out that this project will benefit not only their family and their community, but also can pass on to the next generation. Furthermore, they can take pride in what they do for their community. 2. Green Saturday: In this community, people meet every Saturday and clean public space because it is a nationwide policy. However, during the week they throw garbage on the street or on public space. We plan to take the opportunity from the Saturday event to give the information about the waste management and to educate them about the benefit that they will get from keeping the public space clean. In this activity, we identify key persons which are village head and Green Saturday leader. However, the challenges of this activity could be the reluctance of the village head to support the â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 9 project. Therefore, we will try to motivate the head of the village to do the project by giving him the incentive as he will be the one who initiate the project. 3. Awareness Campaign: Our plan is to share the message about the consequences of having garbage in public space by doing awareness campaign. The campaign theme can be creative design, print advertisement and creative messages or methods to deliver to the audience. We can come up with the location and distribution as the campaign proceeds. In addition, we should have spokespersons during the event. They can be famous actors, famous persons or anyone who can get the attention from people in the village. We first can start by make contact with school teachers from art class or looking for a specific artistic group such as students. However, one of the challenges of this activity is cost-effectiveness. Since holding such event might cost a lot of money, and our fund is limited. Therefore, we might need supporters or sponsors to help us with this. Moreover, we also need an approval and permission for using the space to hold our event, to attach our posters or to distribute our flyers or brochures. 4. Themed Games: We would like to create the cleaning game for kids and people in the community. There will be a theme for each game, mascots and story. Key actors in this activity will be teachers and parents. The games can be conducted in many places such as school, common space or temple. The main purpose for this activity is to give the information about garbage management and to raise awareness on garbage in public space issues. We can encourage local people to join the program by giving prizes. This activity might not be sustainable since we use prizes as a motivation for people to join. However, this activity can be a good starting point on raising awareness to people in the community. 5. Award for Clean community: This activity is to motivate people in the community to clean public space in their community. We will assess the cleanliness of the communities and give the award to the community that show improvement in the cleanliness of public space. Although this is a monetary incentive to make each community join the event, but people in the winning community still will be proud and keep on cleaning their community, and people in other communities will become more aware of the cleanliness of their own communities and start cleaning their public spaces. 6. Effective use of garbage for income and savings: Purpose of this idea is to educate people in the community on how to use garbage effectively in order to generate income and save money. The main activity will be the lessons to train people in the community. In this activity, we plan to work with NGO, experts and people who are passionate on reusing the garbage. The trainings will be provided to specific group such as housewife and youth. It can be hard when looking for the right people to do the training. Also the cost of hiring and inviting is another issue that we should keep in mind. Nonetheless, if this plan works, it will generate the income and increase savings for the community in a long run. 7. Creative Use of Rubbish for School Activity: The idea is to use the garbage in a creative way for school activity. We will ask for the support from the school in the community to insert this program into one of their classes such as art class. The target group will be students in the school and the main key actors will be teachers and â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 10 parents. We will train teachers and educate students about waste management and the benefit of having a clean community. The activity can include collecting the snacks or candy paper to do the art craft. We can have a competition among students to send out the message about the cleanliness of the public space through the art craft. We realize that there are many challenges for this activity. First, the schools and teachers might not want to cooperate with us. Second, parents might want to help their kids by buying new candy and give the paper to them. However, we believe that the fundamental of having the sustainable community should start with kids. Therefore, we think that this activity is one of the very important steps that we need to take. After evaluating all ideas that our group came up with, we integrated five ideas together into one project because the project will be more effective and will be very feasible at this stage. The ideas that we incorporated together are 1) Identifying community leaders, 2) Creative use of rubbish for school activity, 3) Awareness campaign, 4) Award for clean community and 5) Green Saturday. 3. 6 Project for Ban Sengsavang village In order to realize our principle and objectives, a focused project is the first step that we can take. The project title: â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness Through Children and Art† We have also set the objective for the project below:â€Å"Raise awareness on cleanliness by educating and involving children to create their campaign message† Our project will focus on working with kids because involving kids is one of the grass-root approaches and nurturing kids will be the fundamental for a sustainable community design and more importantly we would like the community to create their own awareness message which gives them a sense of ownership of the campaign to motivate their community. 3. 7 Detailed Activities We must emphasize that the concept of these steps are based on an ideal scenario and we also understand there are challenges in every step of the process. The project is designed with the aim of making it attractive and fun, as we understand these are some important element to inspire the local community through an engaging method, even more so when targeting the community of Ban Sengsavang who welcomes entertainment and leisure activities. The objective to provide an early awareness of what is happening within their community; sharing the knowledge of community design and how local team forms within the community can take ownership of the project from the start to the end, including conceptualization to execution and to distribute the message to the rest of the community, based on available talents and local resources in order to achieve the desired result through an awareness campaign from the localized, grass root level of the community; which subsequently can be replicated in the long run for the bigger goal of achieving a healthy, helpful and happy community. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 11 Our group approach to initiate the community design project is detailed in a 10-step process as below; Figure 2: 10-step Approach Step 1 – Meeting IATSS Alumni The initiation of the project is to arranged for a formal meet with IATSS Alumni and to present the project details. The objective is to garner for core support from the alumni as it is very important for the project to proceed with the right recommendation and network opportunities with stakeholders who will be able to support the local team to be formed in the later steps. The communication with the various parties will be consistent and this will include meetings with the Secretariat and the Committee, with the aims to further strengthen the core supporters for the project and to refine details on the project approach. Step 2 – MeetingGroup Leader Village Chief Upon the necessary approval and with initial support from the stakeholders -IATSS Alumni, Secretariat and Committee the next step would be to meet with the village chief and local community leaders of Ban Sengsavang. This is a very important step to follow and to respect the local customs to inform the head of village and the local leaders before any further action or plans implementation. â€Å"Raising Awareness on Cleanliness through Children Art† Page | 12 The aims of these meetings and communication with the local people are to understand the detailed needs of the community regarding the issue of waste in public space, and to also garner support and the necessary cooperation and recommendations from the local leaders for the purpose of kick starting the project from a grass root approach and involving the community to participate and to execute. Step 3 – Meeting Primary School’s Principal Following the blessings and support of the village chief and from local group leaders, the next step is to meet with the Ban Sengsavang primary school principal to share the community design plan for the benefit of the school and also the community. At this point of this project, the identification of key coordinators through the meetings prior will contribute to the forming of a local committee; wh