Empowering

Community
as One of the Way to Develop
Nation

Ellen Maharani
VIII D
09460004964

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 Serving the public as the main function of the state is becoming a doctrine in years.
People believe that the one and only part of the nation which has the obligation to deliver the
service is government, the bureaucrats. Is that true, that bureaucrats with its system
bureaucracy is the only means to run the service? Or there is another way possible?

Introduction
We live in the state-of-being-organized-and-ruled through the system called
bureaucracy. We hire bureaucrats and professionals to do what families, neighborhoods,
and voluntary associations had done before the industrial revolution. We blinded ourself to
taking out the control out of the hands of families and communities to the bureaucracy and
profesionalsm. As the consequences, we, the community are already successful to create
dependency. The community are becoming so dependent upon and controlled by their
helpers and leaders. We are becoming the people who understand themselves in terms of
their deficiencies and people who wait for others to act on their behalf, as we live in the world
of bureaucracy.
When the world is beginning the era of information-technology, people are likely to be
curious of the state-of-transparency. They know more information than before. They want to
know everything that is related to the money collected and spent by the officer of
government. They believe that todays bureaucracy is inefficient, slow and generally bad.
They believe that this nation needs a new public management system to handle all of these
problems to serve public better. They demand an accountability of report; the transparency
of rule and information.
Public care about where the resources spent for, the services they got and the
welfare of the nation. The nation today different from the nation yesterday. Public needs new
nation with new management that could guarantee the better living. David Osborne
summarized new ways to re-manage United State of America with the spirit of new public
management which is called reinventing government. Ten of them are :
1) steer more than they row
2) empower communities rather than simply deliver services
3) encourage competition rather than monopoly
4) driven by their missions, not their rules
5) fund outcomes rather than inputs
6) meet the needs of the customer, not the bureaucracy

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 7) concentrate on earning, not just spending
8) invest in prevention rather than cure
9) decentralize authority
10) solve problems by leveraging the marketplace, rather than simple creating public
programs.
All of the strategies above are noble ideas to be implemented in the idealistic form. In this
paper, the writer want to explore more on empowering community rather than simply deliver
services, in theoritical and practical means of analysis. The writer likes the idea because this
idea show the importance of team-work in walking together to help the community, to serve
the public, to develop nation without being dependent towards the slow-motion bureaucratics
system.
This initiative to empower community implemented in East Africa, South Africa, India,
New Zealand, and several other countries in the world. Empower community promote the
state of being independent to take care of individual, families, communities without waiting
for government action to take control of. Usually, it focused on education, health, water and
sanitation, child-feeding, poverty, security, and other social services that needed the swift
actions to be taken over.

Problem Definition
Empowering community has functions to provide and organize the services as
mechanisms through which individuals can express their collective self-interests, particularly
regarding the issues and problems affecting their families and communities without giving it
out to the bureaucrats system as it could be. This different-unique strategy could be the
answer to reinvent government of Indonesia in way delivering public services. That is why,
the writer state my question research as “Is that empower communities rather than simply
deliver services is likely to be implemented in indonesia?”. The writer have an intention to
explore the empowerment community theory and practical; compare the factors related and
analyze the opportunity to be implemented as new system of servicing the public of
Indonesia.

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Theoritical Framework
A brief history of bureaucracy

Before the bureaucratics era emerged, people handled theirselves with their own
way. People, the community, cultivated their land, growed their plants, fished for living,
breeding, or when they had nothing’s needed they would do bartering. Until the era of
industrial revolution, when mass production had done in such locations, people tended to
just wait for the products, chosed to be employees and leaved the state-of-handling-ownself.
By then, the people, the community had been starting to be independent towards the
system, that later called as bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is somehow not only talking about
government system but also others.
In the government, academic, and corporate worlds, buzz words change almost
frequently enough for people to require a pocket dictionary that can be updated weekly.
Despite any name put to it over the centuries, however, the primary instrument or tool of
authority for the exercise of power continues to be "bureaucracy". The term, "bureaucracy",
basically means "rule by office." It derives from the French word "bureau", meaning office or
desk, and the Greek word "kratein", meaning "to rule." Given that, many cultures had
bureaucracies of sorts in place long before the term entered common parlance.
While philosophical approach especially in China, Confucianism, has permeated
Chinese life for centuries, contains elements that in effect are preconditions for a
bureaucratic regimen, notably two of the four guiding principles (dragons) – respect for
education and compliance with authority. Early Chinese commerce, including the first money
economy, tax collecting, military conscription, among other facets of Chinese daily life, were
so thoroughly ordered by application of the Confucian tenets that successful invaders were
assimilated into the Chinese culture and social structure. To be sure, there were some
changes at the top of the social order but their effects did not have the strength to filter down
through the ranks to the point they particularly impacted on daily life in the cities and villages.
Sheer size of the country, both geographically and demographically, dictated that for the
most part existing officialdom could not be replaced wholesale without great socio-economic
upheaval.
The coming of the Industrial Revolution accelerated the development of
bureaucracies, and, somewhat like Confucianism, Western religions tended to imbue this
development with ethical justification. The last century saw the perfection of the bureaucracy
-- a form of organization that has been enormously successful and is the result of thousands

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of years of trial and error evolution. Max Weber outlined the key characteristics of a
bureaucracy:
1. specification of jobs with detailed rights, obligations, responsibilities, scope of
authority
2. system of supervision and subordination
3. unity of command
4. extensive use of written documents
5. training in job requirements and skills
6. application of consistent and complete rules (company manual)
7. assign work and hire personnel based on competence and experience
In Weber's time, they were seen as marvelously efficient machines that reliably
accomplished their goals. And in fact, bureaucracies did become enormously successful,
easily outcompeting other organization forms such as family businesses and adhocracies.
They also did much to introduce concepts of fairness and equality of opportunity into society,
having a profound effect on the social structure of nations. However, bureaucracies are
better for some tasks than others. In particular, bureaucracies are not well-suited to
industries in which technology changes rapidly or is not yet well-understood. Bureaucracies
excel at businesses involving routine tasks that can be well-specified in writing and don't
change quickly.
Today, many of these principles seem obvious and commonplace. Everything is
changing swiftly, everything is done electronically called online-system. The institution that is
not changing will get into risk itself. Risk is reforming in a different way. We already said
before that bureaucracy is not merely talking about government, but the system. But todays
world are agree to identify the system of government as bureaucracies. Today we also think
of government-bureaucracies as inefficient, slow and generally bad. It is time the
Bureaucratic age ended. An industrial revolution started the Bureaucratic Age - an
information revolution is ending it.

Organizing Community

Following the American Civil War, when countries were becoming disable to adhere
all of public services for the community through its system called bureaucracy, there was a
rapid rise in the number of charitable agencies designed to lend assistance to those
displaced, disabled, or impoverished by the war. Many of these organizations were
progressive in philosophy, even by the standards of the early twenty-first century, and they
provided services to, or activities for, children and teens. The term community organization
was coined by social workers in this era to address the problem of coordinating charity-

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based services, thus reflecting the structural perspective of community. Community
organizing is conceptualized more as a process aimed at creating change. Community
organizing is best described as seeking empowerment, both as a process and an out-come
individuals and collectives.
In community organizing, people unite. The unity might be based on union in
workplace, community on a specific location or geography, constituency on common
individual characteristics (e.g., gender, language, ethnic background) and issue based on
issues rather than common individual characteristics (e.g., taxes, schools, war, health care).
The unity could also be classified by the role in the community such as :
1. Self-help community organizing includes three specific classifications of organizing:
social planning, civic agency, and community development. Social planning is geared
toward technical problem solving, especially with regard to the delivery of goods and
services to people in need. Civic agency is a process characterized as providing
services for those in need. Social change is not an issue for a civic agency - in fact,
the civic agency approach sometimes must avoid social change, as change is
politically difficult due to the support for this approach that exists within the existing
social structure. Community development organizations most often emphasize the
development of the built environment, and only secondarily stress social change.
This approach uses consensus-building techniques to achieve improved community
environments, and conflict is avoided.
2. Electoral organizing, often called political participation, involves the attainment of
power through the electoral process. The activities of the electoral approach include
voting, campaigning for candidates, and supporting or opposing specific issues.
Involvement in the political process, while requiring the participation of many people,
reflects the value of leadership in that the social problem or issue being campaigned
for is ultimately placed in the hands of the elected official. From the perspective of
this approach, the elected official, it is believed, can quickly and effectively deal with
the issue.
3. Pressure groups are referred to by many names, including social-action
organizations, social-influence associations, instrumental voluntary associations,
power-transfer organizations, and empowerment-based organizations. The goal of
social-action organizations is to develop power in an effort to pressure social systems
and institutions to respond to the needs of disadvantaged communities. Any
differences among pressure-group typologies are more a matter of degree than
substance; all share the value of citizen participation. Inherent in the pressure-group
approach is the belief that citizens are best able to know what their communities

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 need, and that the community organization is a mechanism that enables citizens to
address those needs.
The process of building a community capable of acting to improve its circumstances
is called community organizing. Organizing involves building relationships across networks
of people who identify with common values and ideals, and who can participate in sustained
social action on the basis of those values. Community organizing represents the entire
process of organizing relationships, identifying issues, moving to action on identified issues,
evaluating the efficacy of those actions, and maintaining a sustained organization capable of
continuing to act on issues and concerns.
Tension can arise between the process of empowering individuals who participate in
organizing and the process of building power for organizations where organizing is practiced.
This tension is, in effect, between organizing as a process and as an out-come. For some
organizations, efforts that develop the skills, consciousness, knowledge, and confidence of
individuals are sufficient to be labeled empowerment. Others emphasize the need to address
the causes of human suffering in the broader community and society through empowering
communities, especially in terms of self-help community organizing, of people capable of
changing their circumstances.

The Condition of Public Services

There are already two things above describing the bureaucracy system, the common
things that delivering the services into public and community organizing, the alternatives that
emerged after the war. Now, we would like to paint out the condition of public services as
usual, comparing the rich countries to developing one.
For those living in rich countries, basic serves are often taken for granted. However,
in the developing world providers often fail to deliver essential services and people bear the
consequences. Nearly all rich country homes have safe, piped water available 24 hours a
day, but about 800 million people in the developing world still get water from open sources
such as ponds or streams. In rich countries only about 85,000 children under age 5 die each
year from all causes. In the developing world, some 3 million babies die within the first 28
days from conditions that could be prevented if mothers received prenatal care and gave
birth with a trained attendant.
One of the reasons people in developing countries lack services is physical access -
they are just too far away from a provider. But physical access is only one piece of this
puzzle, and usually the easiest piece to put in place. Indeed, over the past 20 years large
gains in access have been made in many countries and more people live closer to schools,
clinics, wells or roads. This massive expansion of physical infrastructure has led to the next

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challenge: are these services effective and of adequate quality? When a child reaches
school, do they learn? If a person reaches a clinic are they treated? Does the well have any
water? Is the road passable? In many developing countries, the public sector is unable to
meet these challenges alone: Providers often do not show up. Resources are necessary, but
experience shows that resources are not sufficient. Pouring more resources into the clogged
pipe of business as usual will not meet the challenge. Public service delivery needs to be re-
invigorated from the bottom up.
Changing public service delivery needs to begin with a system approach. Nearly all
the developing countries have attempted to address their problems with an organizational
form transplanted from a particular period of the history of the rich countries - the hierarchical
civil service. Historically, development thinking was seduced by the idea that the solution to
every problem was to design and fund a program to address it - a program that would be
implemented by a top-down bureaucracy following rules. The response to weak services
was simply to continue to rely on the same system of top-down civil service provision of
services, but adding more and more resources or more special programs to address the
obvious gaps.
A key to solving the “leaky-pipe” problem is to create a system of accountability.
Citizens and communities need to hold politicians and policy makers accountable for
providing public sector resources. And policy makers must be able to hold providers
responsible for their performance in delivering services. Efforts to improve accountability
have been ineffective, largely because they have focused on topdown accountability
(reporting up the hierarchy) rather than bottom-up accountability to citizens (means to
communicate their demands to policymakers) and because they have tracked inputs and
outputs rather than results achieved.
Rewarding inputs rather than results achieved means that policy makers generally
hold providers accountable for money spent and quantity of outputs (like patients treated,
wells constructed) rather than what people actually value. Incentives to provide quality
service at health clinics are weak if budgets and rewards are tied only to the number of
patients seen, not to the quality of care. For the system to work effectively we need bottom-
up accountability to complement these top-down systems. Providers and policymakers have
greater incentives to act if they know that people care and are pushing for change. Policy
makers were aware of the problem, but took no action. Now, local government officials,
teachers and parents are more aware and able to follow-up when there are delays. The
government also publishes disbursements.
Inform and Empower initiative encourages the vision of a mutually reinforcing system
of empowered citizens and communities, responsive providers, and informed decision-
makers in pursuit of delivering public services. We believe that providing meaningful, easily-

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accessible information to citizens, communities, service providers, and policy makers is a
key part of creating home-grown solutions to improve the quality of public services. Better
information can help governments and other providers spend scarce resources wisely. And,
empowered by information, citizens and communities can demand better services from
providers or develop new solutions to meet their own needs.
Effective services, like schools, police, health care, roads, drinking water and
sanitation contribute directly to the well-being of communities. Around the world these core
services are a responsibility of the public sector and people overwhelmingly rely on public
sector providers to make sure that children are born in safe settings and vaccinated; that
they have clean water to drink; and that they are taught to read and write. For an economy
to grow and prosper, producers - both big and small - must be able to hire literate workers,
use well-maintained roads and transport, be protected from crime and disorder, and have
safe ways to dispose of waste.
We will support efforts to provide easily accessible information to people so that they
can choose the best strategy for themselves and their community to improve the quality of
public services. We will use multiple modes of communication (such as media, mobile, e-
kiosks and other technologies) to allow a broader range of citizens to access information and
we will seek innovative methods for disseminating information. We're focused on Informing
citizens of their rights, entitlements, choices, and quality of public services and providing
tools and information to increase access to and use of available services Supporting civil
society organizations that strengthen links between communities and policy makers.

The Revolution

After years, we let our bureaucrats control our public services. We rely on
professionals to solve problems, not families and communities. We create programs
designed to collect clients rather than to empower communities of citizens. By letting those
things happen, we create dependency. There are two kinds of people, clients and citizens.
Clients are people who are dependent upon and controlled by their helpers and leaders.
Clients are people who understand themselves in terms of their deficiencies and people who
wait for others to act on their behalf. Citizens, on the other hand, are people who understand
their own problems in their own terms. Citizens perceive their relationship to one another
and they believe in their capacity to act. Good clients make bad citizens. Good citizens make
strong communities.
Unfortunately, the main problem of bureaucrat system is all about hierarchiecal civil
service. The delivering of services to the public became slower and slower because of top-
down or somehow bottom-up approach that then victimized the community of nations. We

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cannot blind ourselves of this reality. We, the people of community, have to change the
hierarchical-bureaucartics system by starting to organize several public services. On the
other hand, the government should be aware to begin the ownership and control of public
services into communities. By the teamwork-building between both part, communities’
welfare would not be an idealistic statement anymore.
The policy to expand the authority of community in serving theirself had been already
redefining the role of officer. The officer is no longer becoming just officer but as a catalyst to
draw together community resources, to provide resources, backup and training. Officer can
be the most effective if they help communities help themselves. People act more responsibly
when they control their own environments than when when they are under the control of
others. When communities are empowered to solve their own problems, they function better
than communities that depend on services provided by outsiders. This noble idea to expand
the authority to community by provide resources, backup and training is called empowering
community.

Empowerment in a complete definition

Empowering community has several dictions anyway, such as empowerment,

empowering community, empowering service delivery, community policing,
David Osborne stated that empowerment is a nation of self-help organizations.
Empowering community is approaches that focus on community even not always been
embraced by formal government in order to improve social mobility. Activist, Bob Kafka,
stated about Empowering Service Delivery which is the next evolution of the independent
living movement. This approach is likely to change the current service delivery to move it
back to community. Community policing is widely accepted by politicians and police
professionals as an innovative way to deliver services.
Many people claim that by letting the professionals do the “job of community”, we will
let the things done effectively, efficiently and economic. Somehow they are right, but
somehow wrong in versa. Renee Sims said that if you have someone outside managing it
(the professionals), and a pipe burst over the weekend, you’re not going to get it done”.
Simple statement that is surprising. David Osborne mention the several things that make the
empowering community is actually better than professionals service:
1. Communities have more commitment to their members than service delivery systems
have to their clients because they are commited by the reasons of union in
workplace, community on a specific location or geography, constituency on common
individual characteristics (e.g., gender, language, ethnic background) and issue
based on issues rather than common individual characteristics (e.g., taxes, schools,

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 war, health care). The everlasting bonds of relationship than a swift-professionals
relationship that might loose easier.
2. Communities understand their problems better than service professionals. It is all
about the experience things that the community had gone through.
3. Professionals and bureaucracies deliver services, communities solve problems.
Professionals and bureaucracies sees the problem from the outside perspective.
Communities sees the problem from inside and analyze deeper, so that they know
how to cope with the problem.
4. Institutions and professionals offer service, communities offer “care”. Care is different
from services. Services is merely services but care is the human warmth of genuine
companion, support of love, gentle hand of a helper. It is a language sent from heart
to heart.
5. Communities are more flexible and creative than large service bureaucracies.
Bureaucracies, hierarchiecal civil service through top-down or bottom-up system, are
standardized, procedural and slower than it sould be. Communities are more flexible
to take actions.
6. Communities are cheaper than service professionals. It is all called voluntarism and
working for the sake of social needs.
7. Communities enforce standards of behavior more effectively than bureaucracies or
service professionals. There is more reluctant to put professionals to talking about
and imposing the rules, the norms, the behaviors, while family members and
community members are not so.
8. Communities focus on capacities, service systems focus on deficiencies. If the
community are in charge of serving theirself, they will think about the time, talent or
tresure that they could give. While most of certified professionals would like to see
the problems lack of.

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Analysis
The Factors in Reinventing Public Services through Empowering Community

After structuring and organizing the literatur framework by reading those articles,
journals and report about empowering community as one of the means to develop the
nation, the writer already concluded the factors needed to reinvent public services better.
Several factors needed in empowering community, such as :
– Proper planning by problem-oriented policing
Planning was undertaken at both macro and micro levels and also the indicators.
This team decided upon key indicators according to the community’s priorities, which
were later transformed into locally valid goals and objectives to be monitored. The
community-based planning process thus enabled service providers (“facilitators”) and
community leaders to collectively set realistic goals and develop workable plans.
Based on the particular problems revealed, a series (or “menu”) of actions was
initiated. Once the plan was in place, the program was tested for its feasibility,
process of operation, and application in selected, most needy areas. Macro level
planning was geared to supporting these processes through promoting closer
collaboration with relevant sectors. Clear identification and definition of time-bound
goals (targets) at all levels of the program/project.
– Social Mobilization as team policing
Difficulties and obstacles are often faced in implementing plans for decentralization
and encouraging community participation. Operationalizing a new professionalism
based on democratic values such as participation and openness, rather than on
technological values rooted in substantive expertise. Service providers worked as a
team with community leaders and gradually emerged as “facilitators” for community
activities. It was considered essential for social mobilization at the start of the
program or project and for future sustainability by the state of political commitment at
all levels of society. The integration of goals in development programs in general is a
clear manifestation of genuine awareness and political commitment. The
identification and support of facilitators and community mobilizers, providing a sense
of joint ownership of the program/project by the community and government.
– Good implementation until operational levels throughout the country
To provide basic services, a supportive system provided appropriate training and
supervision at various levels for decisionmakers, field managers, service providers,

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 and community volunteers. Implementation of appropriate “menus” of activities, as
well as monitoring and evaluating the community-based program—all guided by the
indicators—were joint responsibilities of community leaders and facilitators. The
system was strengthened through periodic review meetings at the grassroots level,
and annual or biannual meetings at more central levels, to supervise and monitor the
program. A high degree of local level organization was crucial for promoting
interaction between the community and the facilitators for management of activities
and implementation of community-level initiatives. The parallel implementation of
particularly those integrated. Good management of the program/project, including
effective leadership, training and supervision of facilitators and mobilizers, an
appropriate balance between top-down and bottom-up actions, and effective
community-based monitoring. The involvement of local NGOs, who often provided
excellent facilitators as well as culture-relevant training. They were usually
accountable to the community, which facilitated sustainability.
– Organization's structure should be designed to optimize the functioning of its
operational technology
The organization structure is needed to intensify the focus on localized capacity-
building, community mobilization, and targeted, interpersonal communications aimed
at improving the targeted. The structure has to enable substantive lessons,
interventions criteria, a broader integrated system, effective supervision and
management that enable the mobilization of communities to sustain the process
beyond the project. The presence of charismatic community leaders, who can
mobilize and motivate people to do more for themselves in a genuinely self-reliant
way.
– Proactive prevention rather than reactive detection
The evolving toward an approach that stresses human capacity-building a proactive
integration with the system. The community know everything more than professionals
to be rather than reactive after problems emerged. The creation of awareness of the
high prevalence, serious consequences, and causes including the hierarchy of
immediate, underlying, and basic causes, and the need to address causes at all
three levels. The initiation, promotion and support of a process whereby individuals
and communities participate in assessing the problem and decide on how to use their
own and additional outside resources for actions.
– Attitudinal and behavioral changes
It integrated leadership strengthening into the day-to-day challenges that workers
faced. the improvement in employee morale through the creation of participatory
teams in a traditionally hierarchical structure. A more active and positive role than

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 before to overcome their challenges including committed and capable staff.
Empowering community needs a culture where people are involved in decision
making. It was a prerequisite for people’s participation and the creation of articulate
bottom-up demands and also associated strongly with participation and
organizational capabilities. The director of Mossuril Health Center commented that
"What I noticed from the very beginning was that the staff was very motivated and
they are still motivated because ... when they are called to participate ... they really
feel considered, valued."

The practical matters

There are some programs that let the bureaucratics system out of the implementation
but the empowering community. The programs are spreaded all over the world. The
programs are mostly funded by the international lending organizations. They need more
accountability and transparency, they want to encourage the participation and more sense of
belonging, they choose the empowering community despite of giving the money to the
countries and let it be spent. In America, like Osborne said, they already implemented the
empowering community as one of the ways to develop their nation. The sources of fund and
the intentions to implement are not merely from the donor organizations. Government
allocated some nominal of fund in expanding the opportunity to let the community build its
priority needs. By doing so, the american government is creating citizen that care about their
capabilities, not the clients that only knew about their deficiencies. Here are some of the
examples of empowering the ommunity programs from all over the world to Indonesia.
First program is community development in Aotearoa New Zealand. It can be
conceptualized as three concurrent processes such as :
(1) statutory work undertaken by the State through central government departments
and local authorities (consisting of a system of legislation, funding assistance to
individuals, groups and organizations and the provision of social services),
(2) social change processes undertaken primarily through the collective action of
individuals, groups and organizations that give voice to marginalized groups and
communities and
(3) the forces of change within Tangata Whenua communities working for tino
rangatiratanga, self determination.
The community development as policy and the practice of social change through organizing,
coordinating and initiating activities that enhance the wellbeing of individuals, groups and
communities is more than ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and, therefore, cannot be

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conceptualized simply in terms of ‘resistance’. It is a holistic process of transformation
encompassing socio-economic, political, cultural, environmental.
The second program is social welfare in South Africa as new way to secure children
and parents. The City of Johannesburg has been presented with an innovative programme
to address child poverty and early childhood development - that would also regenerate local
economies by enabling poor communities and thus parents to earn money in the process. It
builds upon Education Minister Naledi Pandor's announcement that funds for the Child
Nutrition Programme must from now be used to buy food grown locally and not simply
imported from wholesalers. The City Council called for a comprehensive plan to meet the
needs of the 300,000 plus children aged 0 to 5 living the city. The majority experience
extreme poverty and neglect. The proposal comes from a developmental consortium of New
Economics innovators, Wits academics, and early childhood development experts.
The budget is allocated for child-feeding, community gardens, small farms and
backyard livestock. This allocation given locally to generate local economic stimulation, to
alleviate poverty. There are of course challenges in the concept and the practice of creating
or reviving communities as recipients of state funding. The model understands that the real
poverty is in the absence of local institutions and the paucity of local management – which it
builds. Trusting very poor people with large sums of money is counter-culture in the world
today; and the skills of community entrepreneurship are not widely valued or highly paid.
Another one is health units in the Nampula Province of northern Mozambique are
located in remote areas far from the Provincial Directorate. Directives and funding from the
central MOH in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, arrive slowly and sometimes not at all.
Mozambican health workers operate in areas of striking poverty, and managers work
diligently to stretch out their resources in an environment with below-average health
indicators, even for sub-Saharan Africa. Infant mortality is high, and the HIV infection rate
had by 2002 climbed to a sobering national average of more than 13%. The program also
offered decentralized health units the opportunity to work with communities to address the
communities' needs. Despite having no operating budget for much of the program, 10 of the
11 participating health units were able to achieve most of their goals. In the process, the
program created a culture of results and gave managers and health care providers a sense
of control over their actions. The second success factor in the Challenges Program was the
improvement in employee morale through the creation of participatory teams in a traditionally
hierarchical structure. After their participation in the program, people no longer waited to be
trained but instead asked for the training they needed. Overall the health units that
participated in the project have taken a more active and positive role than before to
overcome their challenges. The director of Mossuril Health Center commented that "What I
noticed from the very beginning was that the staff was very motivated and they are still

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motivated because ... when they are called to participate ... they really feel considered,
valued."
The general low level of services forced staff to focus on basic challenges such as
improving cleanliness, improving biosecurity, decreasing patients' waiting time, and
increasing the number of attended births. The health units also had few skills in developing
indicators to monitor performance, although by the end of the program they proudly
presented simple graphs and tacked them up in the health units for patients and staff to see.
MOH workers in Nampula are realistic when they speak about Mozambique's substantial
health challenges. But they also report that the Challenges Program approach to improving
management and leadership at all levels has promoted the efficient use of critical resources
and, most important, empowered staff to make a difference in their own areas.
Other is about malnutrition that occurs during childhood, adolescence, and
pregnancy has an additive negative impact on the birth weight of the newborn in Thialand.
lies at the heart of the nutrition investment plans under the ADB-UNICEF Regional Technical
Assistance Project on Reducing Child Malnutrition in Eight Asian Countries (hereafter
referred to as the Project).
While Action for Health Initiatives Inc (ACHIEVE) highlighted that groups of
marginalised communities need to be meaningfully involved at all stages of the program. It is
crucial that any programs designed are based on the needs of the affected communities,
including research. More over, to have community researchers is an advantage because
they can empathize the research participants in better ways.
In Indonesia, empowering community is actually also done in several project funded
by international financing organizations mostly focus on infrastructure. The grants and the
loans are distributed directly to the community needed. It has the spirit of empowering the
community, because the international financing organizations feel by giving them directly to
the community, the result-oriented would probably be reached.
Kecamatan Development Program, funded by a blend of IBRD loans and 200 million
in IDA credits is the provision of block grants directly to villages for financing grassroots-level
development initiatives. The residents of Tirtomayo held meetings to discuss how they
planned to use the grants. They knew exactly what they wanted: improved access to water.
With the help of facilitators and technical experts, they worked together on a plan to translate
this dream into reality. An underground deep well was then dug with machines rented from
the city, high-capacity pumps were brought in, and a network of pipes were then installed. It
was very successful because the community felt involved in the process from the very
beginning and we're happy with the result. It was about sense of ownership to maintain the
system after.

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 Another $50 million ADB loan to the Government of Indonesia is to rehabilitate and
improve rural infrastructure in about 1,800 poor and isolated villages in East Java, Nusa
Tenggara East, South East Sulawesi, and South Sulawesi provinces. The project gave the
beneficiary communities some freedom to decide what to do with the money, allowing them
to propose the subprojects they needed most, because they know most for their problems.
All subprojects were selected, designed, and constructed by communities with technical
support from village facilitators. The community members also chose to improve the washing
areas, sanitation. In this project, participatory is needed. When people know what they want,
and so they'll take ownership of the projects.

Core of Idea about Empowering Community

After years, we let our bureaucrats control our public services. We rely on
professionals to solve problems, not families and communities. We create programs
designed to collect clients rather than to empower communities of citizens. By letting those
things happen, we create dependency. To solve the problem, the idea is all about expanding
the opportunity to the community itself to provide the services they needed. It is all about
empowering the community to be more independent, to be more care of their capacities, to
solve their own problem. It is all about self-help organizations system. Bureaucracies’ and
professionals’ function is merely as catalysts, to draw together community resources, to
provide resources, backup and training, not fully the player of the role. The community might
plan and prioritoze their own needed to be the programs, might organize the important detail
part more quickly than a bureaucratic sytem, might provide the healthy-competition among
the personal in the community as people serve theirselves, might control their own
environments.
By implementing the empowering community, the bounding spririt are the community
itself would bond in everlasting relationship than a swift-professionals, community itself might
understand their problems better than service professionals, community itself solve problems
from inside and analyze deeper, community itself offers “care”, community itself is more
flexible and creative than large service bureaucracies, communities are cheaper than service
professionals, community itself enforces standards of behavior more effectively than
bureaucracies or service professionals, and at last community itself focus on capacities,
service systems focus on deficiencies.
In practical means of idea is the policy is implemented for special programs or
projects that are funded by the international organizations. It is better to take the spirit of
empowering community in the system of government to implement bigger portion of

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government projects with its own budget. It is more idealistic than just get the funding from
the international and empowered.

Opportunity to be implemented in Indonesia

The noble idea is about implement the empowering government as one of the way to
develop the nation. The writer propose the government of Indonesia, enable and allocate the
special budget of each technical departement of such programs and project that involve
more on community and individual citizens in it. By doing so, the writer believe that the state
of transparency, accountabilty, efficiency, effectiveness, economic could be reached
together within the government and its citizens. We will examine those factors needed in
reinvent the public services through empowering community, if we analyze by the
perspective of implementation in Indonesia.
– Proper planning by problem-oriented policing
Indonesia usually facing problems in good visionary planning. The planning is
usually stuck in short-term target. The capability of integrate at both macro and micro
levels is weak. Planning is somehow is just procedural work without spirit of workable
plan and reaching those goals realistically. The needed to build the feasibility
program, process of operation, and application in selected, most needy areas with
closer collaboration with relevant sectors, clear identification and definition of time-
bound goals (targets) at all levels of the program/project must also be highlighted.
Government as catalyst has to develop a rule, procedures and proper law and
standardizations to ease the technical-practical things. Each ministry or public
institution has to have the ability to state strategic management and its all over tools
in order to succeed the empowering community program. The ministrial institution
also has to prioritize and build the proper environment for the community to enable
the implementation of problem-oriented policing. The community has to gain the
knowlegde of analyzing, structurizing and prioritizing problems to programs.
– Social Mobilization as team policing
Difficulties and obstacles are often faced in implementing plans for
decentralization and encouraging community participation. Indonesia is newly
implemeting the decentralization. The community is years enjoying the state of being-
ruled. The initiatives from the community, sometimes is endangered. People tend to
stay awaf from being assertive. People tend to do something based on merely the
payment. Indonesia, the nation as a whole is lack of participation and openness.
Indonesia community is always complaining about the public services distribution but
still doing nothing to improve.

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 Indonesia needs the state of political commitment at all levels of society. The
integration of goals in development programs in general is a clear manifestation of
genuine awareness. Indonesia needs a support and a sense of joint ownership of the
program/project by the community and government.
– Good implementation until operational levels throughout the country
Good planning is not the guarantee of good implementation. Even if
Indonesia is pretending to have a good planning, still if the people cannot implement,
it turnd to be worst thing. Indonesia has provide a supportive appropriate training and
supervision at various levels for decisionmakers, field managers, service providers,
and community volunteers as well as monitoring and evaluating the community-
based program. Later, the system was strengthened through periodic review
meetings at the grassroots level, and annual or biannual meetings at more central
levels, to supervise and monitor the program.
People of Indonesia always face the problem of directing the actions planned.
The problem is coming from the sustainability. The programs might work well for its
first months, but no guarantee upon the later. To keep it running well, good
management of the program/project, including effective leadership, training and
supervision of facilitators and mobilizers, an appropriate balance between top-down
and bottom-up actions, and effective community-based monitoring are shocking
needed. The involvement of government, local NGOs, and ofcourse the community
would like to promote sustainability.
– Organization's structure should be designed to optimize the functioning of its
operational technology
The organization structure is needed to intensify the focus on localized
capacity-building, community mobilization, and targeted, interpersonal
communications aimed at improving the targeted. The structure of ministries or public
institutions have to enable substantive lessons, interventions criteria, a broader
integrated system, effective supervision and management that enable the
mobilization of communities to sustain the process beyond the project. The presence
of charismatic community leaders, who can mobilize and motivate people to do more
for themselves in a genuinely self-reliant way. By doing so, we minimize the
hierarchical civil service that slower the distribution.
– Proactive prevention rather than reactive detection
By implementing the empowering community, the spirit of proactive rather
than reactive to solve the problem is evolved. The community know everything more
than professionals to be rather than reactive after problems emerged. The

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 implementation create and in one side demand the awareness of the high
prevalence, initiative and also decisiveness of the community.
– Attitudinal and behavioral changes
The spirit of building the characters should be involved in implementing the
empowering community and the demands towards those, goes hand in hand. The
attitudinal and behavioral changes It should be built and also demanded to integrate
leadership, morale to be more active and positive role, tighetened-up the
committment, boost-up the capability, decision-maker, highyly-motivated and
valueable.
After all factors, the writer believe that, it is realistic to implement impowering-community to
develop nation. It is the way to give extra opportunity, extra money but in the other side
demand extra commitment to implement. Without critical barriers, the writer is sure that the
government of Indonesia, together with the community as a whole and the NGOs might
succeed the main aims of the nations as stated in preambule.

Barriers to implement

Planning, organizing, implementing and reporting is somehow could be learned if

every part of nation has the willingness. But still, there are two important barriers that could
hamper the realization of empowering community as branches programs of the ministrial
departement. This two things should be warned us from the beginning of the implementation
until the end and continuing process.
– Mobilization
Resistance to change is usual in the implementation of new system. People
think that the old system is better to be implemented. The status quo is already serve
the needed. This mind-set stucks the people of community to be mobilized for he
programs and the projects. In order to succeed, the community mobilizers should be
respected members of the community, most often volunteers or at least not
remunerated from outside.
The mobilization of strategic allies also is a very important tool in creating a
supportive environment for change. Through local government-community
partnerships, mobilization and participation is promoted and supported at each level.
Active community participation leads to community ownership. Active (or proactive)
community participation should thus be differentiated from passive (or coerced)
participation. The active participation is directed to encourage the other passive one
to mobilize community.

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 Communication plays a special role in social mobilization through arming
parents, educators and other caregivers, not only with basic nutrition information but
also with the ability to make informed decisions and the skills and knowledge needed
to take action to strengthen nutrition-improving processes in their communities.
Communication should be carried out simultaneously at various levels turn teach and
support good practices. Advocacy, information, education, and training are all
important communication strategies to create or increase this awareness. After all
informed, it is easier for the community to be mobilized.
Governments and international agencies can set conditions in place that will
help foster public participation and facilitate bottom-up approaches, through
empowering individuals with accessible and relevant information so that they can in
turn mobilize communities; through establishing mechanisms for recognizing and
gathering the views of all nutritionally vulnerable people, particularly those whose
voices often go unheard; and through strengthening democracy and encouraging
political participation at all levels. Processes for the public to be consulted on and to
have an input into the policy making process are needed, including free elections,
freedom of speech, and a vigilant free press. Finally, governments and international
agencies should support NGOs as effective interfaces between the interlocking top-
down and bottom-up approaches.
– Sustainability
Sustainability is conventionally defined as the durability of positive results. But
it is more than this, programs need to make a difference in the long term,
sustainability of positive outcomes and positive processes is crucial. Emphasis is
increasingly being placed on the ability of the program to strengthen the capacity of a
person, household, or community to adapt to changes in their surrounding
developmental environment. Programs may deliver services will be important that
such services and benefits continue—at least so long as they represent an effective
and efficient use of resources as compared to other options.
It is thus ultimately the sustainability of the process, not the program per se,
that is most important, with the link between the two being community ownership.
Program sustainability, considered in this way, is merely a milestone along the road
to process sustainability. Sustainability must be built in from the planning stage,
building on local improving processes to assure support, and promote commitment
and the mobilization of local resources. Sustainability analyses need to be long-term,
as the objectives for such programs involve changes in community and household
decision making which require time to take hold. Both external and locally mobilized
support will need to match these long-term objectives.

22 | P a g e
 Sustainability relates to: the stability and strength of support for a program
from key stakeholders (including the community, local and national government, and
other external agencies); the coverage, intensity, targeting, quality, and effectiveness
of actions; the status and condition of program infrastructure, the systems for its
maintenance, and the adequacy of the operating budget; and long-term institutional
capacity, including the capacity and mandate of operating agencies, the stability of
staff and budget of operating agency, adequacy of coordination between agencies
and between community organizations and beneficiaries, and the flexibility and
capacity to adapt the project to changing circumstances
The selection and training of facilitators and community mobilizers is key. It is
the relationship between facilitators and community mobilizers that determines the
extent to which outside support can become catalytic and empowering, rather than
creating a new dependency that cannot be sustained. Facilitators should not train
mobilizers in what to do, but rather strive to empower them. This requires both
participatory training methods and a power-shift from the outside supporter to the
facilitators and the mobilizers. Outside support channeled through facilitators
includes advocacy, information, education, training, and direct service delivery. A
continuous interaction, management structures and systems might also be the
reason to stay sustainable.
Yet the concept has been abused in the past where “community participation”
has been covertly viewed as a way of co-opting local people to undertake certain
tasks cheaply, so as to further goals set by external programmers. In such
approaches, community participation in implementation was usually not matched with
power over decision-making or control over the use of resources. Consequently,
there was little sustainability.
In sum, a monitoring system should be built up from below to provide the
necessary information for analysis and action to all those who can contribute to
improving the situation. Key basic principles for the use of information for action
include the requirements to: only collect data that will be used; maximize the use of
data at the level they are collected; and to collect the minimum, feasible amount of
data required to inform and improve decisions leading to action. By doing so, the
writer believe that the empowering community will not disappered quickly but long-
last.

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Closing
Before the bureaucratics era emerged, people handled theirselves with their own
way. People, the community, cultivated their land, growed their plants, fished for living,
breeding, or when they had nothing’s needed they would do bartering. Until the era of
industrial revolution, when mass production had done in such locations, people tended to
just wait for the products, chosed to be employees and leaved the state-of-handling-ownself.
By then, the people, the community had been starting to be independent towards the
system, that later called as bureaucracy.
In Weber's time, they were seen as marvelously efficient machines that reliably
accomplished their goals. And in fact, bureaucracies did become enormously successful,
easily outcompeting other organization forms such as family businesses and adhocracies.
Today, many of these principles seem obvious and commonplace. Everything is changing
swiftly, everything is done electronically called online-system. The institution that is not
changing will get into risk itself. Risk is reforming in a different way. Today we also think of
government-bureaucracies as inefficient, slow and generally bad. It is time the Bureaucratic
age ended. An industrial revolution started the Bureaucratic Age - an information revolution
is ending it.
Ending the bureaucratic age means changing public service delivery needs to begin
with a new system approach. Nearly all the developing countries have attempted to address
their problems with an organizational form transplanted from a particular period of the history
of the rich countries - the hierarchical civil service. A key to solving the “leaky-pipe” problem
is to create a system of accountability. Inform and Empower initiative encourages the vision
of a mutually reinforcing system of empowered citizens and communities, responsive
providers, and informed decision-makers in pursuit of delivering public services. We believe
that providing meaningful, easily-accessible information to citizens, communities, service
providers, and policy makers is a key part of creating home-grown solutions to improve the
quality of public services.
The policy to expand the authority of community in serving theirself had been already
redefining the role of officer. The officer is no longer becoming just officer but as a catalyst to
draw together community resources, to provide resources, backup and training. Officer can
be the most effective if they help communities help themselves. People act more responsibly
when they control their own environments than when when they are under the control of
others. When communities are empowered to solve their own problems, they function better
than communities that depend on services provided by outsiders. This noble idea to expand

24 | P a g e
the authority to community by provide resources, backup and training is called empowering
community.
By implementing the empowering community, the bounding spririt are the community
itself would bond in everlasting relationship than a swift-professionals, community itself might
understand their problems better than service professionals, community itself solve problems
from inside and analyze deeper, community itself offers “care”, community itself is more
flexible and creative than large service bureaucracies, communities are cheaper than service
professionals, community itself enforces standards of behavior more effectively than
bureaucracies or service professionals, and at last community itself focus on capacities,
service systems focus on deficiencies.
The noble idea is about implement the empowering government as one of the way to
develop the nation. The writer propose the government of Indonesia, enable and allocate the
special budget of each technical departement of such programs and project that involve
more on community and individual citizens in it. By doing so, the writer believe that the state
of transparency, accountabilty, efficiency, effectiveness, economic could be reached
together within the government and its citizens. We will examine those factors needed in
reinvent the public services through empowering community. The factors that should be in
consideration such as proper planning by problem-oriented policing; social Mobilization as
team policing; good implementation until operational levels throughout the country;
organization's structure should be designed to optimize the functioning of its operational
technology ; proactive prevention rather than reactive detection and the change on
attitudinal and behavioral of the community.
Planning, organizing, implementing and reporting is somehow could be learned if
every part of nation has the willingness. But still, there are two important barriers that could
hamper the realization of empowering community as branches programs of the ministrial
departement. This two things should be warned us from the beginning of the implementation
until the end and continuing process is the mobilization and sustainability. Without strong
commitment and willingness to attain the target, the empowering community is just likely to
be a statement.
After all factors, the writer believe that, it is realistic to implement impowering-
community to develop nation. It is the way to give extra opportunity, extra money but in the
other side demand extra commitment to implement. Without critical barriers, the writer is
sure that the government of Indonesia, together with the community as a whole and the
NGOs might succeed the main aims of the nations as stated in preambule, the welfare of the
nation.

25 | P a g e
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