Entrepreneur-Based Residents Organisations

I have the opportunity to visit 13 neighbourhood in Petaling Jaya over the last two weekend. I saw vast disparity between different neighbourhood area and their residents organisation. Differences on the understanding about meaning of sustainable development, the role of residents organisation and local authority, the administration and management of society, the true sense of partnership and engagement as well as resources planning.

While some organisations have shown their maturity and professionalism in handling the affair of organisation, others need further improvement on knowledge and skill. Some use LCD projector to brief us on their achievement for sustainability, some are still relying on oral presentation. Similarly, some neighbourhood saw big improvement on socio-economic and environmental activities, many are still struggling to improve on civic mindedness and basic cleanliness. I presume this is normal urban phenomenon with residents having different expectation gap, social status and income level.

Having said this, one of the common understanding amongst the neighbourhood is to attend to challenges facing them the most. Some area have identified security and crime as top priority while some area have prioritised social integration as major concern or provision of basic urban services as top of their list. This shows competency in identifying and planning community issue-based analysis, a pre-requisite for Local Agenda 21 Action Planning. The issues will then become basis for strategic actions formulation.

Residents organisations carried out activities tailored to their local need, and rightly so. Although different residents organisation with their own nature of community profile might have thought certain activities are not relevant or important, I am of the opinion that many are actually applicable to all locality with some minor adjustment. For example, in neighbourhood area with strong bonding and closer relationship amongst residents, self-help programme offering micro financial or kind assistance was established. The assistance is provided for the purpose of disaster remedies, new born, wedding, education, welfare or funeral service. While neighbourhood area with well to do residents might not have thought the necessity of having similar fund, the concept of self-help should be adopted for other activities such as for the neighbourhood watch, social gathering, maintaining the green and etc.

With the disparity in organising activities at local level, I think MBPJ as the prime mover of local sustainability should organise capacity building programmes for the organisations. It is of use to share with them the knowledge and skill of running and managing an organisation or programmes. Although the organisations are voluntary base, managing of it with social approach is no more sufficient. Management, marketing and planning of the organisation and its programmes have to be done professionally.

This explain why many social organisations adopting the concept of social entrepreneurship are performing better. For sustainability sake, voluntary-based residents organisations in Petaling Jaya have no choice, but evolve to the entrepreneur-based local social organisations.