Speaker 1: Community-based approaches to mental health and psychosocial support work with affected communities to enable them to care for and support their members. They involve the community in all stages of the response, from assessment and planning to implementation and evaluation. In 2020, the Working Group on Community-Based Mental Health and Psychosocial Support of the IASC Reference Group on MHPSS organized online exchanges for practitioners around the world about the practical challenges they face in their work. In preparation for this, field practitioners submitted questions about the issues they found most difficult about conducting assessments, monitoring, and evaluation within community-based approaches. Instead of a conventional webinar, the Working Group organized an online exchange that enabled practitioners to speak directly to each other to exchange experiences. A question that participants chose to discuss was, what does it take to go beyond superficial involvement of community members in our assessment, monitoring, and evaluation processes?

Speaker 2: See two main aspects. So when you're monitoring, you have the community that you're working with and yourself. So if you start with ourselves as people working in the community, I think it also starts with that attitude to actually wanting to go beyond just getting people to sit in our meetings and be nominal representatives and an attitude to learn. So starting with that, if you move on to community, community needs to understand what they are monitoring. Then only it becomes meaningful and they can get actively involved in what they are monitoring or assessing. Ideally, if you have time, the process would start at the planning stage, where you involve community in planning what you're trying to do and identifying the need first through formal meetings, informal conversations, talking to diverse groups of people in the community because community is also not a homogeneous group, understanding the diversity. And then once you have started the project and you want to involve them in monitoring, it's also a matter of identifying the indicators with them. What are the indicators of change that they feel? How is it manifested in their lives, in different groups in the community? How does it affect them? So that helps you to also identify whether some things that are good for some people might also not work so well for others, especially people who are marginalized in a particular community.

Speaker 1: Participants also discussed the question, how do we practically adapt and apply global tools in local contexts? Colleagues shared examples of how they practically approach the adaptation of tools and establish the validity of language and meaning in these.

Speaker 3: Some examples of how we have adapted tools and measures to local context is that for measures, often before we start to look at using measures for assessments, we conduct free lists and interviews with people in the community to really understand the language that's used around the topic and what the main issues are. So for example, when we're looking at updating a scale or a set of questions to the local context, we would make sure that we're using the language that people have used in those free lists and interviews talking about MHPSS related problems that they have. And also then looking at whether or not questions should be added to that scale that are really relevant to that, what the scale is looking to measure, but are very specific to that context.

Speaker 4: In my opinion, the adaptation of the global tools for intervention consists of the following five steps.

Speaker 1: In their breakout rooms, participants shared their experiences, challenges, and solutions from diverse contexts. Then they came back to share some of the highlights of what they had discussed.

Speaker 5: One of the main themes that really came up as we were discussing the first question was the importance of involving community members since the very beginning, since the assessment phase, and to be able to set realistic indicators as well as processes with community members in terms of what can get achieved within a certain timeline. Now processes of adaptation can take some time, and therefore it's important to be realistic and to really work alongside with communities from the very beginning. We also talked about the importance of transparency, and someone brought up a really powerful phrase of purpose, not power, and how do we create the space so that people can be a part of the M&E process and really have the data collected, also given back to community members so that people can use it and really be active agents in seeing how these processes take shape. We talked about that for the first question, and then also just the amount of time that this can really require. In question B, in terms of how do we adapt these processes and these global tools to more local contexts, the importance of language really came up. How do we work with language? How do we work through language in order to adapt to different contexts? And the time that it might take to translate materials to then build capacity of different institutions, of different staff members, and how donors should be informed of those processes, and to really start that from the very beginning as well. And we also lastly talked about how language sometimes can be stigmatizing, and so how do we work through that? And someone brought up that we don't really get around that, but there's a reason why these stigmas exist, and so to really work with people in order to understand the context and in order to, again, create spaces where new identities and perhaps new languages, more neutral languages, can be formed.

Speaker 6: Key point that was brought up was relevance versus excellence. So especially it was mentioned that especially when collecting data, we need to focus on what is relevant. It has to be good data, but we need to focus on why we are collecting data. Is it for internal monitoring and evaluation purposes, or is it for publication? So focus on these things, and no matter how excellent the material is, if we don't adapt it accordingly and it is not useful, then we are not meeting objectives.

Speaker 1: These conversations continue within an emerging community of practice. For more information about community-based approaches to MHPSS, see the guidance note from the IASC MHPSS Reference Group. You can find this resource and connect with other practitioners working with community-based approaches at mhpss.net.