ICA:UK history

The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA)

The Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) is a global network of research, demonstration and training organisations "concerned with the human factor in world development".

It aims to act as a catalyst for people in a variety of contexts and circumstances to take active responsibility for their own personal, community and societal development. ICA traces its origins to the United States of the early 1950s.

The 1950s - exploring community and social responsibility

In 1952 the Christian Faith and Life Community was founded by students and faculty of the University of Texas in Austin, to explore how and where their Christian faith was relevant to the social issues of the day. In 1962 a member of that community became director of the Evanston Institute for Ecumenical Studies, a training centre established eight years previously by the World Council of Churches, in Evanston, Illinois.

He was joined at the Institute by seven families of the original community, where they began to develop and teach programmes of religious and social studies stressing the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own actions.

The 1960s - pioneering participatory local community development

It was the desire to put the theory behind these programmes into practice which led these families to move to Fifth City, an almost derelict and abandoned black neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago. Here they discovered that the greatest block to development was the people's own self-image - their view of themselves as helpless victims of social forces beyond their control.

As the Ecumenical Institute, they worked with residents of this depressed and neglected community to help them to discern their problems and devise practical, locally-based and replicable solutions. As a result, programmes of social and economic development were designed and implemented through voluntary co-operative action, creating a practical operating model of participatory community development.

Soon the community began to believe in itself. The Fifth City Community Project survived the 1968 Chicago race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, and became a prototype for citizen participation in community renewal around the world.

Programme activity of the Ecumenical Institute had already expanded rapidly such that, in 1967, 14,000 people participated in Institute programmes and courses in North America, and over 2,000 in various countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. By 1972, over 30 community living units, or Houses, were working with 188 congregations in North America to replicate the Fifth City model in a variety local contexts.

The 1970s - replicating human development projects worldwide

As programmes expanded beyond the confines of the Church and became international in scope, and after a decade of operating as a programme division of the Ecumenical Institute, the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) was separately incorporated in 1973 -

"to further the application of methods of human development to communities and organisations all around the world, based on a secular philosophy".

By the mid-1970s ICA had expanded from its base in Chicago to over 100 Houses in 30 countries. The foundational participatory methods of the Fifth City model were further tested, refined and replicated in pilot Human Development Projects with disadvantaged communities in each of the 24 time zones worldwide, and also through new private and public sector seminars known as LENS - Leadership Effectiveness and New Strategies.

During this period, ICA began to actively recruit local staff where it worked around the world, from a wide variety of religious and social backgrounds. As national ICAs came to be established worldwide, the Institute of Cultural Affairs International (ICAI) was founded in Brussels in 1977 to facilitate the activities of autonomous national member Institutes.

The 1980s - sharing approaches that work

By the early-1980s, ICA's programmatic focus on small pilot projects gave way to wide-scale replication and dissemination of learnings. The New Village Movement saw ICA's programme in Kenya grow in 10 years from a single demonstration to involving over 1,500 villages The International Exposition of Rural Development (IERD) was a three year exchange programme co-sponsored by the United Nations.

It drew global attention to over 300 successful locally-managed initiatives in 53 countries, and culminated in a major international conference in New Delhi in 1984. The IERD was documented in a series of three books.

By 1988, ICA had been completely decentralised. This paved the way for a movement toward local restructuring, reorientation and indigenisation of national ICAs worldwide. Programmes continued to build on the proven models that had been pioneered in Fifth City, and on ICA's foundational participatory methods.

These had been named the 'Technology of Participation' (ToP) with the publication of the first ICA methods 'text book' ('Winning Through Participation' by Laura Spencer, 1989).

The 1990s - diversifying locally

Programmes were also, however, able to become increasingly diverse and specific to local circumstances. By 1990, ICAI was describing the wide-ranging work of its member Institutes in terms of four primary themes - enabling sustainable development, facilitating organisational transformation, advancing life-changing learning and promoting international dialogue.

These four arenas still represented the main thrusts of ICA's work globally in 1996, as reflected in the four streams of discussion on 'civil society' at the 1996 ICAI global conference in Cairo - Development, Business, Education and Culture.

By the time of the ICAI global conference in Denver in 2000, "the Millennium Connection", these had broadened to include 7 streams - the Art & Practice of Participation, Arts for Community Transformation, Community Youth Development, Philanthropy for Social Innovation, Spirituality in Organisations, Sustainable Community Development, and Wholistic Lifelong Learning.

ICA:UK

ICA:UK traces its roots to the first courses of the Ecumenical Institute in Britain in 1968, and its evolution in many ways mirrors that of ICA globally.

The first House in Britain was established in Teesside in 1971. ICA was first registered locally as a UK charity in 1976 with the launch in the east end of London of one of the original 24 pilot Human Development Projects. Town Meetings held around the country - 200 of them in 1978 - led to replication projects with disadvantaged urban and rural communities in England, Scotland and Wales.

Local & International connections

Local and international connections were strengthened by the Volunteer Service Programme, which has since 1981 trained and placed over 300 UK volunteers in ICA and related grassroots development projects worldwide - and by Village Volunteers, a sponsorship scheme supporting the indigenous local development workers of ICA in Kenya since 1985.

Partnerships overseas

International project partnerships began with the administration of an ODA (now DfID) grant to ICA's work in Egypt in 1986-88, and expanded with further grants from Comic Relief and other donors since 1996.

Facilitation services

Facilitation services in Britain may be traced back to the very first LENS (Leadership Effectiveness and New Strategies) courses here in the early 1980s. The present UK programme of facilitation services began, however, with the first public Group Facilitation Methods course in Bristol in 1996.

As ICA decentralised globally in the 1980s, leaving local ICAs to recreate their own structural and programme arrangements, a nationwide UK membership network was established in 1987, comprised mainly of returned international volunteers.

This network then assumed responsibility for ICA's UK programme activity following the dissolution of the last ICA House in Britain, in London in 1989. Network members became the Trustees of the ICA charity of that time, ICA Development Trust (registered in 1985, charity no. 293086).

ICA:UK was incorporated in 2001 by Trustees of ICA Development Trust in order to accommodate all of ICA's UK activities within a single limited-liability charitable company. Since ICA:UK's registration as a charity was completed in February 2002, ICA Development Trust has now transferred its charitable activities to ICA:UK and wound itself up.