Goal

Marginalised populations continue to face the brunt of natural and human disasters. Most research focuses on how these communities are marginalised. A considerable amount of research has also focused on the many ways in which people have come together in solidarity. However, more investigation is needed to understand the creative, prudent and practical ways in which communities may work together to build a future that is equal and has opportunities for human flourishing for all.
Marginalised countries have further demonstrated resilience, attentiveness and innovation in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic and other health and social issues, including gender-based violence, HIV, poverty, racism and inequality. By developing an integrated understanding of social solidarity, we can contribute to The Foundation's interest in human flourishing. Working in South Africa, we want to bring together an interdisciplinary team to collaboratively develop guidelines for public health interventions that emphasises communities' agency and solidarity when dealing with global crises. Working with and for marginalised communities, we will be able to demonstrate how to harness social solidarity for global public, social and health crises. This will take a participatory approach from beginning to end of project. Very few similar projects do take this approach.

Opportunity

There are many theories addressing social resistance and social solidarity, ranging from focusing on protests and social movements to small, everyday acts of social solidarity. While many of these theories are compatible, research has not integrated these various theories on social solidarity. We would also like to collaborate with various communities and organisations to take a participatory approach to understanding social solidarity. We have an opportunity to incorporate diverse understandings of social solidarity (within the context of COVID-19 and other public health crises) and take a participatory, interdisciplinary approach to understanding how communities come together in times of crisis.

Roadblocks

While we may apply and integrate participatory approaches, the challenge would be integrating this into other existing healthcare frameworks or approaches. We need to think how to include community voices into a bureaucratic healthcare system. We need to tackle issues around mistrust and lack of participation from communities. We need to make sure we incorporate as many different communities as possible into the process.
We are bringing together diverse theories from a variety of knowledge traditions together to understand social solidarity. As there are a multitude of understandings and different terminologies, defining social solidarity may prove to be a challenge.

Breakthroughs Needed

We will take a participatory research approach at each stage of the project, from the conceptualisation of the study through to the writing up of the various outputs. We will collaborate with a wide variety of stakeholders, including communities, civil organisations, tertiary institutions, NGOs and government. We will use participatory workshops and ethnographic approaches with a variety of creative and inclusive methodologies to ensure meaningful collaborations. This will allow us to examine the multiple and complex aspects of social solidarity in dialogue.
This project will be national and try to reach multi-contexts. That it, it will be able to integrate understandings of social solidarity across lines of gender, race, class and geographic location.
After extensively reviewing the literature we need to clearly define social solidarity and develop an exclusion list for literature that does not fit within our definition of social solidarity.

Key Indicators of Success

3 years: Can we determine factors of social solidarity? Can we engage with various stakeholders to explore social solidarity? (If any answer is 'no' then the project will probably fail.)
5 years: Can we pull together learnings across each of our data collection methods to think about social solidarity? Can we operationalise it into tangible guidelines for harnessing social solidarity? (If no, the project will fail)
10 years: Will local government and other stakeholders buy into the guidelines developed in the project? (If no, the project should be considered a failure. Partial buy-in would be considered a success)