Finding Our Voice in the World

by Mark Butler, with Cindy Dennis, Thulani Ndlazi, David Ntseng, Graham Philpott, Zonke Sithole, and Nomusa Sokhela.

Since the Church Land Programme’s (CLP) conscious shift to a broadly Freireian and emancipatory commitment to ‘animation’ as its core process, continued attention to ongoing cycles of reflection and action is central to its organisational life. In the build up to its 3 year Strategic Planning process in July 2010, CLP staff conducted a series of reflection sessions. In January a joint session developed elements of a collective ‘contextual analysis’ and, in the months that followed, each staff member was responsible for preparing and facilitating reflective sessions looking at their own and CLP’s work through the lens of ‘praxis’ or animation. Much of that thinking and material from those sessions was taken into the evaluation process and is captured in that documentation. In this short note we bring together contributions made around a couple of related themes that ran through many of the discussions.