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CORE Workshop
December 9, 2004
Washington, DC
Overview
The CORE Group and the Positive Deviance Initiative sponsored a half-day workshop on December 9, 2004 at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC. Speakers were Jerry and
Monique Sternin of the Positive Deviance Initiative and David Marsh from Save the Children. The Positive Deviance Initiative is a Ford Foundation-funded grant through Tufts University to amplify Positive Deviance (PD) and to encourage new applications.
Jerry Sternin began the workshop with an overview of the Positive Deviance approach and how it has been used for behavior and social change. David Marsh of Save the Children described the use of the PD approach in maternal and newborn care programs in Pakistan and Vietnam, and Monique Sternin described how it has been applied in advocacy against female genital cutting in Egypt. Building on these examples, and bringing together development experts from a variety of areas, the workshop sought to explore the potential for applying the Positive Deviance (PD) approach to areas other than nutrition.
Participants were encouraged to consult the Positive Deviance Initiative website for useful tools and frequent updates: www.positivedeviance.org . Jerry and Monique Sternin (Positive Deviance Initiative) and David Marsh (Save the Children) can all be consulted as resources for program development. They hope as well to document new applications of this approach.
Power point presentations are linked within this document and handouts and supplemental literature are linked at the end of this document. For greater flexibilty, it is recommended that you right click on the powerpoint presentations, and select "save target as" to download the presentation to your computer. The presentations may also be viewed on the web by simply clicking on the link.
For more information on Positive Deviance/Hearth please refer to the PD/Hearth manual on the CORE website (www.coregroup.org). The manual is now available in:
Positive Deviance Approach for Behavior & Social Change
Jerry Sternin
Positive Deviance Approach for Better Maternal and Newborn Care in Pakistan and Vietnam
David Marsh
Positive Deviance and Advocacy against Female Genital Cutting in Egypt
Monique Sternin
Session Wrap-Up
This brief session brought to light several examples of how the Positive Deviance approach has been applied to bring about behavior change with community ownership. Gretchen and Warren Berggren’s work with Hearth nutrition rehabilitation programs in Haiti laid the foundation for work that would be joined with the Positive Deviance approach of the Sternins and Save the Children in Vietnam. The approach has subsequently been successfully applied in settings as diverse as US hospitals, Pakistani towns and Indonesian villages. It has helped those ‘communities’ find solutions to problems ranging from hospital-based infections to post partum care and girl trafficking.
Positive Deviance can bring about other unexpected benefits. For example in India, the Hearth mothers made their own demand to apply the approach to improve harmony in the community. A joint Hearth was created for Hindu and Moslem women, respecting the food habits of both.
Today World Relief, working in Rwanda with 300 Hearth centers is facing another problem (in addition to child malnutrition). Approximately 8 percent of the children may be HIV positive. This new reality has spurred the search for a new PD/Hearth model that would serve the needs of this specific group of children. USAID and the Food for Peace Office are looking at operations research issues and programming possibilities.
The limited time for this workshop did not permit discussion of other challenges as organizations seek to apply the positive deviance model in a wide variety of situations. However, participants were encouraged to consult the Positive Deviance Initiative website for useful tools and frequent updates: www.positivedeviance.org. Jerry and Monique Sternin (Positive Deviance Initiative) and David Marsh (Save the Children) can all be consulted as resources for program development. They hope as well to document new applications of this approach.
Supplemental Literature Handed Out at the PD Meeting
The following PowerPoint files, documents and websites provide supplemental information on many of the projects referred to during this meeting.
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