ACHR support for Young Professionals

The following reports briefly describe those YP-oriented activities which ACHR supported during 2004

Background on ACHR's work with Young Professionals    

As community groups around Asia become stronger and scale up their activities, mobilize more internal and external resources and negotiate an increasing number of land and housing breakthroughs, inevitably things are getting built - houses, toilets, drains, community centers, water supply systems.  And as the scale of this process swells, it continues to be useful to have some engineers and architects around, adding their skills and vision to the design process, or having young writers, journalists and film-makers to help document the work.  In many cases, professionals and technical people know very little about poor people’s lives and have been trained to operate within the context of different relationships and standards.   Even those with the best of intentions can sometimes end up frustrating community processes, which have rhythms of their own.  This is how one of the first young professionals to receive ACHR support, May Domingo, puts it: 

“We have to respect people’s involvement in solving their own problems.  As professionals, that means learning when to take a step or two back, to give way to people’s ways of doing things.”

A new kind of professional, sensitive to the realities of poor settlements and flexible with her skills requires a different kind of training - a training that is hard to find in universities and technical schools, whose curricula don’t always translate into the messy realities of Asian cities and the vast numbers of poor people they contain.  More and more young people, whose eyes are open to the problems of their own cities, want to get involved and do something.  But what to do, who to ask, how to begin?

ACHR’s young professional’s program began in the early 1990's with the aim of putting young people into communities, through internships and exposures, where they could learn first-hand some of the lessons missed at university, from the survival experts - the urban poor.  It began through the concern of the ACHR elders in 1988 and was formally launched with a YP workshop in Manila in 1994, which brought together young people and academics from around Asia and helped establish a network of YPs. 

It was during the 1994 YP Summer School which ACHR organized in Cambodia that the program really began to come together.  Students at the Architecture Faculty wanted to involve themselves in helping Phnom Penh’s poor communities but staff and resources to help them were scarce.  The summer school gave students a chance to work with community groups and advisors on redevelopment plans for eight poor communities. By the end of the summer, they had a vision :
Young professionals as agents of change, who can bring youth, energy and ideas to the grassroots, to help catalyze a process, not direct it.

Starting off
During the early years Mayumi Kato - a young architecture graduate from Japan's TOYO University co-ordianted the YP programme. She was based in Bangkok at the ACHR Sec. Apart from helping coordinate the early Philippines and Cambodian workshops, Mayumi lead YP's around Asia to become important participants in most ACHR exchanges, workshops and large events. Such as the 10 day exposure programmes at OPP in Pakistan, KIP in Surabaya, Land Sharing workshops in Bangkok. Mayumi was able to bring together in a Regional Progrogramme the rich experience of YP programmes amongst ACHR partners - particularly those in Karach, Bombay, Surabaya and Manila.

Internships.  
As the Asian YP network expanded, a programme of community internships began to take shape.  We tried to let internships grow in a natural way, to balance needs of communities and the young professionals who contact us, putting the two together in ways that allow both to grow.  By 1998, ACHR had supported three interns.  Two had “graduated” and found stable support systems by themselves.  More and more students and young graduates were wanting to share their understanding with the poor and to develop “alternative” careers for themselves in the process.  ACHR ended up counseling a lot of young people who were exploring life and career paths very much off the beaten track.  ACHR's first YP intern was May Domingo, a young architect from the Philippines.  May’s involvement with the urban poor went back to her university days, when she and some fellow students questioned the social relevance of architects and promoted sharing and exposure to poor settlements.  She went on to work with community groups on housing projects in Tondo, Manila’s largest slum.  Later, on her ACHR internship, she visited cities in India, Pakistan, and Thailand.  May decided to stay in Phnom Penh, where she worked with poor communities for several years - first with ACHR, and later with a UNCHS project

Focus on curriculum change 
The 1994 summer school in Phnom Penh also helped identify another focus for the YP Program - to help more universities (which are the places from which Young Professionals emerge) to develop curricula more in touch with the realities of Asian cities.  Whether at Oxford Polytechnic or Ho Chi Minh University, generations of professionals discover and drag home European town planning concepts which don’t always translate into the jumbled realities of Asian cities.  Asian cities have their own traditions of urban land-use, their own social realities, as different from these other models as night from day.  Not to mention their immense populations of working poor people.  One antidote for this kind of urban planning far-sightedness, is for training institutions to zero-in on the dynamics of urban poor communities, which form a majority in most Asian cities.             

Arif Hasan & Fr Jorge Anzornea have stressed the need to influenced curriculum in Asian educational institutions

More recent focus on strengthening local YP teams to support local community development processes
In the past few years, ACHR has moved away from the big workshops, gatherings and exposure training programs for selected YPs, and focused more on helping local groups to gather and strengthen teams of young professionals and technical people within their own countries to provide long-term technical back-up to the soaring number of community upgrading, housing and infrastructure projects being undertaken by poor community organizations.  To meet the technical assistance needs of the community-driven processes in many Asian countries, which have scaled up enormously in recent years, the YP processes within certain Asian countries have also scaled up to meet those needs (such as Thailand, India, Philippines, Pakistan), and ACHR's support to those YP processes has involved more support to provide stipends, internships and expenses to expand the YP teams to include new faces and bring in new cities.  But there are still countries in the region where the availability or maturity of the local YPs still lags behind the community-driven development processes (such as in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, East Timor), and in these countries, ACHR has focused its assistance more on helping to create new linkages between busy community groups and professionals, universities and architecture schools which may soon become feeder-organizations for community-driven development projects.

 

YP's Thailand

 

Updates on YPP 2007