Forging links across 17,000
islands ...
Building
a network of grassroots groups and their supporters across Indonesia to
find collective solutions to big problems of urban poverty . . .
Uplink Indonesia
is the name chosen by a growing coalition of urban poor community
organizations and their NGO supporters to describe the efforts they are
making to bring together the work they are doing in cities across the
country to bring changes in the lives of the urban poor.
In recent months, they've been meeting each other, comparing notes
and beginning to explore ways of joining forces to create a national pool
of ideas and experiences about how to make the country's cities better
places for everyone to live in. This is no easy task in a country where
collective action of any sort was blown away during a long, oppressive and
corrupt dictatorship, during which any kind of public assembly was
perceived as a threat to the state and violently subdued.
Even five years after that regime was toppled by a populist reform
movement, the country is still in a state of enormous flux, and powerful
political forces are still undermining any efforts to bring the poor
together or to boost their participation in decisions which affect their
lives.
Things are just getting started, but Uplink Indonesia
is determined to move past these forces of division and fragmentation and build a national movement for change - from
the ground up. It is vital
that in the long run, communities of the poor, as the main group seeking
social justice, own and manage their own development process and become
central to its refinement and expansion.
If poor people and their supporters can work together to design a
range of strategies and options which improve their situation, and then
use those options to begin a dialogue with the state, this is a way to
influence the choices that cities make.
If the poor can be the ones who add more options for cities to
choose from and when those new ideas are coming up from the bottom, from
poor communities, it is a way of socializing cities.
To make change in Indonesian cities, a lot of people
need to have their vision of possibilities expanded.
This requires lots and lots of people looking for solutions to
their problems, making lots of experiments, supporting each other and
sharing their breakthroughs. This
is how to build scale into that movement:
a large scale of options, a large scale of involvement, a large
scale of confidence. And when
thousands upon thousands of Indonesians are looking for ways to get the
same things, that critical mass creates solutions and breaks down the
resistance to change, dissolves the barriers between poor people and
resources.
