Bodh regards education as a social process in which community’s role is viewed as central in shaping the educational objectives, its implementation strategies and overall school development. The school is seen as not merely imparting education to children enrolled in it, but also in bringing about a real social change in the surrounding community. Community groups traditionally left out from the fold of education- adolescent girls, women, preschoolers and the community at large are also brought into the fold of education. In Bodh’s conception, community involvement is central to the formation of an idea of a school and raising it physically and functionally. Bodh believes that community’s involvement grows as interaction between and amongst the participants of educational process – children, teacher, parents, community members and programme organizers becomes more intense. 

 

  The idea of a school can be translated into reality only when the community concerned feels the utmost need of it and is prepared to do whatever it could to set up the schools.

Eliciting Community involvement involves rigorous work of establishing deeply interactive and closely cooperative relation with community, sharing its trials with the objective of evolving a collective endeavor towards its children’s quality education.  This would entail removing the community’s apprehensions and skepticism about NGOs’ attempts to engage them

 The first initiative is to generate a sense of ownership for the school on the part of the community.  This may be reflected in different forms, ranging from provision of land, building, space for the school building or space or rooms in their house/premises for holding classes, or funds, materials or voluntary labor in lieu of funds share for construction of school/class rooms. 

Teachers to be trained in eliciting support of the community and should be involved in the process of raising the school from the very beginning. 

 The processes of community participation, leading to community ownership of the school, as conceptualized and followed in respect of Bodhshalas is depicted below. 

 

Visits of Project functionaries to the habitations

Contact and dialogue for need assessment

Identification of habitation for school

Training of teachers in Social mobilization

House-hold survey and School mapping by teacher

Out of school activities with children and community meetings to finalize the school site

Constant dialogue with the Community members byTeachers every day for one and a half to two hours

Periodic group meetings with the community

Visits of project functionaries and stakeholders for dialogue with community

Community ownership of the school

 

Bodh sees the community's role in the financial management, the administration and the curricular processes of the school. Some of the measures adopted by Bodh to overcome the most frequent problems when seeking to create community participation are as follows:

Problems	Strategies
Teachers’ indifference towards community	Living with, and studying the community, Conducting household survey for identifying prospective children, school mapping, holding community meetings for sharing information and eliciting solutions, etc., essential part of teacher preparation.     Male teachers live in village, with community at least 20      days in month. All teachers spend 1.5 to 2 hours every day with community
Lack of concern for the school in the community	Provision of place/space for the school by the community Contributions for raising the school building by the    community Formation of a Teacher-Parents Collective as a consultative group Formation of women’s group, adolescent girls’ forum, youth forum by the teacher as part of the school work Discuss progress of children with community through special meetings Visits to absentee children’s houses by the teachers and schoolmates
School functioning as a blackbox	Community inputs encouraged for proper functioning of the school Pre-school component with ‘mother teacher’ from the community Efforts for training of children in skills existing in community  Using community resources for classroom learning
Provider-recipient relationships	Visits, direct dialogue by functionaries with the community Fortnightly sharing meetings with teachers where community members participate on voluntary basis Norm-based provision of teaching-learning material and school equipment