Get The Heart Working First

The Main Idea

When someone is brought into a hospital with massive injuries and apparently dead, the fist thing that is done is to get the heart working. All the other work that needs to be one on the person can wait until the heart is working, because if it does not work the other activities will be meaningless.

In community development work, a similar situation exists. People are what make a community and its institutions work. If the people are totally demoralized and without hope, then it is like a body that has been injured and the heart has stopped - there is a need to get the heart working first.

There is a saying that "a person can live about thirty days without food, ten days without water and about two minutes without hope". Bringing hope back into a situation where it has all but drained out, is one of the toughest problems in the area of Community Development. The situation is compounded when a whole town or area has been labeled "hopeless", by the community themselves, or by outsiders.

The approach of "getting the heart working first" in Rural Community Development, deals with the restoration of hope in individuals and community, without which no other programs or initiatives are likely to be sustainable.

One of the biggest problems I have encountered in my sphere of work is that generated by the split in the Protestant church into two sections. One section prefers a "take hold" approach to life, and the other prefers a "let Go" approach. There would be no problem with that if it weren't for the fact that both approaches to life are necessary, and that people in both groups frequently are in need of the truths and insights from the opposite group, yet cannot seem to accept help from the other group. Then, if they do get help from the other group, they sometimes find themselves "tumbling". Recently I have discovered a fourth level for a previously developed tool called a "wish list" which gets around both these problems/ This tool is explained in this section of the web-site.

Off-Line Resources

On-line Resources