Community Facilitators in the Pursuit of Justice: Lessons from Jordan on Recruitment, Training, & Data (Arabic)

The Community Empowerment Project, initiated by the Open Society
Foundations in Jordan, builds on and complements existing refugee
response efforts through legal empowerment and community-based
justice services. The project supports both Syrian refugees and host
communities in Jordan to understand and use legal and administrative
systems to find concrete solutions to justice problems. In the pilot phase
of the project, three Jordanian organizations coordinated to incorporate a community facilitator approach into their existing legal aid programs.
Community facilitators (CFs) are frontline justice workers recruited from
within the communities where they work and supported by a team of
project staff and lawyers. Community facilitators use basic knowledge of
the law and administrative procedures and a range of skills to take on
many roles that help beneficiaries gain access to justice, including conducting
community outreach, providing information, accompanying beneficiaries
to certain government offices, referring cases to lawyers and
other service providers, and collecting information on beneficiaries and
their grievances to support evidence-based advocacy efforts. CFs can
address justice issues in various thematic areas.

In this project, each partner chose to focus on justice issues that were
urgent needs of the target communities and that fit within the mandate
of the organization. Partners recruited both Jordanians and
Syrians as community facilitators.

During the pilot, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development
(ARDD), Justice Center for Legal Aid (JCLA), and Tamkeen developed
their community facilitator projects around some agreed commonalities,
such as the role of the CF and basic training modules,
while also leaving room for experimentation and adjustments based
on their thematic areas of focus and organizational structures.
Namati played a support role through sharing experiences and tools
from the legal empowerment field, informing the planning process,
and facilitating cross-partner learning.

The following sections offer reflections on the recruitment, training,
and data collection methods that these partner organizations used
during the pilot phase of the community facilitator project.

This resource is also available in English.