International insight. Community impact.

Innovations in Community Action for Resilience and Education (iCARE) is an initiative which combines elements of our community-first research methodology with a vision to amplify community action by social enterprises. The aim is to enable the sort of innovation and experimentation in community initiatives to become more evidence driven by providing data support which can enable expert researchers to get involved without taking decision power away from the local communities.

iCARE objective

iCARE’s objective is to enable and build evidence for innovations that support restoration of local communities and their resilience through community action, data science, agroecology  and education.

So just as IDEMS as a whole works to create a virtuous circle of data, education and community action, primarily in the global south, iCARE aims to apply this approach to place-based social impact in the global north by supporting other social enterprises with development, data and education.

Priorities

iCARE initiatives prioritise:

• Local knowledge and community leadership;
• Cooperation and collaborative approaches;
• Economic and environmental sustainability;
• Diversity of activities and income sources;
• Transparency, to enable information and knowledge sharing.

iCARE initiatives also align with our desire to support scaling:

• Adoptable and adaptable by other communities;
• Evidence/data based, so that when things go well/wrong all the data provides a learning for others;
• Designed, owned and deployed by the people who use them.