Barriers and Solutions: Communities and World Pulse

I can foresee two main challenges/barriers to creating change in my community: skepticism and impatience. The skepticism is because they (community members) may not believe that change will really happen and because many times they want that change to happen at a rate that may not be practical. When the changes do not happen as fast as they would like, members have a tendency to become disheartened and reduce the amount of effort they put into a project. Many projects in my country has fallen to the way-side because of a lack of proper planning and also because people lose interest or were not very committed to it in the first place.

A solution to that would be to point out all the small changes that are happened along the way as a means of keeping up optimism about the project and as a means of motivating them and keeping their energy up. Having them buy into the change, understanding the need for it and having a solid plan would also help to remove barriers.

As for the WorldPulse site, I am still feeling my way around trying to see how I can tap into its resources… I try to go on it a couple hours each week, looking at what people are posting from other countries and reading some articles. I find that I am sometimes not sure how to navigate the site, however, the last two weeks of classroom material have been especially useful in that regard. I believe though that for me to tap into its potential I need to dedicate some more time to the site and build my friend list. The list is an issue for me as I am not sure how I choose whom to add when I do not know the people. When that becomes easier to do, the resources that can tap into to help to overcome the challenges in changing my community would be getting feedback on ideas, getting help finding information and to some extent general peer support and motivation.