Community Awareness & Public Engagement

Awareness raising is one of the three mechanisms ADAM was founded on, alongside advocacy and formal schooling. It is the work of changing what a community believes is normal, possible and unacceptable.

Why this matters

Many of the constraints on minority communities are held in place by belief rather than by policy — the belief that certain families cannot be educated, that certain trades are all that is available, that raising a complaint achieves nothing. Sustained public engagement is the slowest of our tools and often the most decisive.

What we do

• Community forums and town-hall meetings on discrimination and inclusion.
• Awareness campaigns on the value of education, especially girls’ education.
• Public health, hygiene and anti-drug awareness campaigns for young people.
• Workshops with elders, religious leaders and youth groups on stereotypes and social bias.
• Grassroots mobilisation of minority households around shared local priorities.
• Launch events and public communication of ADAM’s policies, findings and reports.

How we work

Sessions are held in the communities themselves and in Somali, led wherever possible by people from those communities. We measure success not by attendance but by what people do afterwards — enrolling a child, reporting a case, standing for a committee.