A working model
The Social Programme
Relationships, trust, and shared knowledge create conditions for collective action.
How the Social Programme works
Four connected processes
Four connected processes reinforce one another. Choose a process to see how it contributes to the programme.
Meaningful encounter
This process creates spaces for people to meet beyond conventional introductions, beginning from shared interests, questions, and experiences. It develops mutual social knowledge, helps participants discover common ground and understand differences, and can rebuild the minimum trust needed to come together.
Serious dialogue
This process initiates structured conversations that seek to understand social realities and create shared meaning without forcing agreement or closing down differences. Serious dialogue helps develop ideas, formulate questions, and widen the communicative space among participants.
Partnership experiments
When mutual knowledge has matured and a foundation of trust has formed, participants can test shared work through small initiatives. This creates space to learn, discover the possibilities and limits of cooperation, and build practical experience through the work itself.
Building lasting forms
When partnerships show that they can continue and create public value, the programme can support their transition into more stable forms — such as specialised initiatives, platforms, networks, or relatively independent institutions able to develop their resources and impact over time.
Documentation, evaluation and learning
Continuous documentation, evaluation, and learning accompany the processes so the model can develop on the basis of accumulated experience.
Rebuilding the social sphere
Mubadara is developing a proposed theoretical and practical framework and method of social intervention called the Social Programme. Starting from the Syrian experience, it explores how to contribute to rebuilding the social sphere in societies affected by conflict. Its initial hypothesis is that restoring the capacity to come together precedes restoring the capacity to organise and represent shared interests, and that societies are better able to develop institutions and partnerships when they have a living social sphere in which relationships, knowledge, experience, and shared action can accumulate.
The programme therefore focuses on restoring the social conditions that help a society discover its priorities, create its projects, and develop forms of cooperation grounded in its own experience. It considers the social sphere as the environment in which relationships form, the communicative space as the setting in which dialogue can continue and accumulate, and social action as the process through which this sphere is reproduced and expanded.
The programme proposes a sequence of generative and participatory social processes through which people can test cooperation, develop shared knowledge, and accumulate experience. Over time, this may support projects, institutions, and networks that respond to social needs and are grounded in lived experience.
The programme works through social processes intended to restore the capacity to come together and to strengthen the conditions in which projects, partnerships, and institutions can emerge gradually.
What is our approach?
The social programme is the initiative’s approach to understanding Syrian society and working within it. It is a theoretical framework and a method of social intervention focused on rebuilding the social conditions for renewed shared action, accumulated experience, and the emergence of projects and institutions in more realistic and sustainable ways.
This approach assumes that social interaction is the environment in which knowledge, trust, cohesion and shared interests develop, and from which the capacity for cooperation, organisation and representation emerges. Institutions do not exist apart from the society that produces them. Representation gains its meaning not from being declared, but from the social relationships that give it trust and legitimacy.
In this sense, the social programme differs from approaches that begin immediately with organisational structures or predetermined projects. It starts with the question that comes before them: how do we create an environment in which people can develop their forms of cooperation and institutions from their own experience?
Political, civic, cultural and economic activity all require a society capable of producing the relationships that sustain them. The more vibrant the social sphere, the greater the possibility of more firmly rooted partnerships, representation and shared action.
- Meet
- Dialogue
- Test cooperation
- Build durable forms
What these connected processes can support
As these processes interact, networks of communication can expand, trust, experience, and knowledge can accumulate, and people can become more able to create forms of cooperation that respond to needs revealed through practice.
- A wider communicative space
- Trust, knowledge, and experience accumulate
- Shared projects, partnerships, and lasting forms may emerge
Initial theory of change
The Social Programme connects its working processes through the following pathway:
- Meaningful encounter
- Serious dialogue
- Partnership experiments
- Building lasting forms
- A wider communicative space
- More social action
- Accumulated knowledge, trust, and experience
- Projects, institutions, and partnerships emerge
- More grounded social participation and representation