CBSM in Humanitarian Work

Hey everyone,

I was wondering if any of you have heard about the use of CBSM in international humanitarian work and whether there are any postgraduate programs available along lines similar to this?

Doing a bit of research into humanitarianism it becomes clear that there is a lot of ineffective top-down approaches taking place and communities are not benefiting, sometimes even being placed in a worse position than before the intervention. There has been a bit of a resurgence in taking a botton-up approach such as with microfinance but it still appears to be pretty rare. I think the CBSM model would address many of the issues I see going on in humanitarianism and I would like to pursue something along these lines in my graduate education but I am having a bit of difficulty finding schools and supervisors interested in doing this kind of work.

Mainly I'm interested in researching and working directly with local communities to change behaviours around problematic health, psychosocial and socioeconomic issues. I would look into international development or public health but often these areas, at least at the postgraduate education level, seem to be more concerned with theoretical approaches and large organizational movements. So far I have only found a few individuals involved in community psychology who are involved in this kind of work but was wondering if anyone knew of any other programs or researchers.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Beau

Beauregard Simmons
Canada