One of the objectives in our community forestry project is to have more local community members to join the project. This year, we gave ourselves a realistic number, to solicit 3 members from an indigenous tribe just below our park, Yongfu tribe (from the Amis). As with any community facilitation, you can’t just walk up to people and go straight to the topic. For a few years now, we’ve been building connections with them slowly by paying visits during Chinese New Years and their Harvest Festival. Even though everyone in this village knows each other, it is normal for groups to stick to their own. Social dynamics are complex as we all know. However, we want to change that and build a down-to-up community-based management of the forest landscape. We visited them one evening in hopes to introduce to them the values and opportunities for them by participating in this project. We attempted twice. We first had a casual group talk to let the elders know about it, and the second attempt was a more in-depth briefing. Some showed interest, while others didn’t. Some hoped the project could steer in a certain direction while others wanted something else from it. Within the scope and limitations of the community forestry project, we are still trying to find a middle ground to uphold the project’s core values and finding options that motivate enthusiasm for local tribal members.
We also reached out to our nearest village members, Nan Juhu (South Juhu Village) to solicit 1-2 members who have collaborated with us before. Where will this take us in terms of expanding our numbers? Well, we hope that with more members, more can be done in terms of exchanging and sharing knowledge and skills in practices they are talented at. This builds social resilience and social dependencies, which is important for rural communities. And as importantly, this creates a better capacity to be stewards of the forests that surround them.
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