Circle of Rights: Intentional Planning for Social Change (formerly Triple A)

The Circle of Rights: Intentional Planning for Social Change (formerly Triple A) is IICRD’s flagship approach to child-centred social change.

Building from the collective wisdom of children, families and communities, this participatory, reflective, and child-centred process helps guide community stakeholders, agencies and policymakers through four phases – Map, Engage, Plan, and Create to develop integrated child rights policy, programming and monitoring systems supporting positive social change.

The Circle of Rights and all of the tools:

· Applies an innovative child rights approach to planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of children’s rights

· Builds on strengths and empowers local communities to develop innovative, local solutions to self-identified challenges

· Supports children’s survival, development, protection and participation within a community development and local planning context

· Puts the participation and agency of children and youth at the center

· Supports social innovation strengthening government and civil society action planning, monitoring, evaluation and budgeting for results for children

· Creates positive sustainable change for and with children and youth by linking local actions with ongoing advocacy, policy and legislation reform.

The Circle of Rights evolution began in 1994, and has since been applied around the world to help tackle complex child rights challenges including children affected by HIV/AIDS, natural disasters, extreme poverty, discrimination, violence and conflict, and has evolved into a robust process to help communities and governments develop contextualized systems of governance and accountability to support and protect children. Specifically, the Circle of Rights has been applied in the following contexts:

· Malawi:

· South Africa: overcoming adversity with children affected y HIV/AIDs in the Indigenous South African Cultural Context

· India: supporting the psycho-social recovery of children and communities affected by the Tsunami

· Jordan: support the psycho-social recovery of Iraqi children and families living in Jordan

· North-Eastern BC: building a culturally-based child and family service system for Aboriginal, First Nations and Métis peoples

· East Timor: supporting the development of a contextualized child protection system

· Thailand: strengthening the capacity of local governments to develop, implement, and evaluate local development plans for children

· Child Protection Partnership (Thailand and Brazil): supporting the development of multi-sector strategies to combat sexual exploitation enabled by information, communication, and technology

Note: The Circle of Rights is currently undergoing revisions and a revised set of workbooks will be available shortly.