3.1 Community analysis - decide priority issues There are many ways a community analysis can occur. A selection of tools are included in Section 4 of this Guide. You may also have those that you are more familiar with, and that are appropriate to your community’s context. The most important aspect of this stage is to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute – that they are able to tell the story about their experience living in the community and what matters to them. Following are some high-level questions you may find helpful. You may also be able to go deeper into some of the detail, depending on the nature and trust of the group. • what matters to them about the community? • what are they most proud of? • what is difficult or challenging? What is unfair? • what impact does this have? • who/what do they think is responsible for difficult or challenging circumstances? • who makes decisions in the community? • what are their individual and collective strengths? • and so on … It is not important at this stage to talk about human rights or human rights frameworks, in fact it is best to use language and cultural concepts that the community is familiar with. Human rights language can be introduced later. At some point during these discussions, you will know whether the community is ready to identify and prioritise its issues. While previous engagements will have involved specific groups, this is an opportunity for a ‘whole-of-community’ event. This may occur: • over a specific time, such as a face-to-face (or online) community meeting. • over a period of time such as a week-long street (or online) survey. • alongside an event such as a sports games, or festival, or an organisation’s strategic planning workshop. Whatever process the community chooses to do use, it is aimed at finding out those issues that most concern people – and of those, the top priorities the community wants to address. The latter can be a difficult process and will require finely tuned facilitation skills. During this process make sure that: • the community accepts only a few top priorities • diverse opinions are taken into account and contribute to the decision-making • quiet voices are listened to, particularly those most vulnerable to the issues that are concerning the community. Ideally the community comes up with its own list by consensus, or by popular vote. However you can support the process by asking questions about resources including personnel, time-availability, practicality, and capacity. The community may decide to keep its priority list but to begin to address the top (say) three priorities for its first action plan. Once these priorities are identified, you can begin to introduce human rights, demonstrating how a human rights lens could offer a way to understand and address the issues. APF HRCLD Guide 39