In 2001, the Universal House of Justice introduced to the
Bahá’í world the concept of a cluster—a geographic construct, generally defined
as a group of villages or as a city with its surrounding suburbs, intended to
assist in planning and implementing activities associated with community life.
This step was made possible by the establishment of training institutes at the
national and regional levels during the 1990s, which employed a system of
distance education to reach large numbers with a sequence of courses designed
to increase capacity for service. The House of Justice encouraged the Bahá’í
world to extend this system progressively to more and more clusters in order to
promote their steady progress, laying first the strong spiritual foundations
upon which a vibrant community life is built. Efforts in a cluster were
initially to focus on the multiplication of certain core activities, open to
all of the inhabitants, but with a view to developing the collective capacity
needed to address in due time various aspects of the social and economic life
of the population as well.
In the decade that followed, then, social action would
increasingly come to be conceived within the context of the cluster. The
conception of grassroots social action that began to emerge was thus able to
assume a much more pronounced collective dimension than had been previously
articulated. During the same period, notable progress was also being made by
OSED [Office of Social and Economic Development] in its attempts to help
systematize the experience of especially promising programmes and to learn
about structures and methods required to enable communities around the world
not only to benefit from them but to contribute to their further advancement.
Today, in the establishment of continental and subcontinental offices—each
serving either a network of sites for the dissemination of learning about the
junior youth spiritual empowerment programme or a group of Bahá’í-inspired
organizations dedicated to the promotion of some other educational
programme—can be seen the first fruits of OSED’s efforts to raise up structures
across the globe to enhance collective capacity for this purpose. Underscoring
the importance of what has been achieved so far, the Universal House of Justice
wrote in its message dated 28 December 2010:
Eventually the strength of the institute process in the
village, and the enhanced capabilities it has fostered in individuals, may
enable the friends to take advantage of methods and programmes of proven
effectiveness, which have been developed by one or another Bahá’íinspired
organization and which have been introduced into the cluster at the suggestion
of, and with support from, our Office of Social and Economic Development.
Accomplishments over the past three decades in the area of
social and economic development, then, combined with the consistent rise in
human resources in clusters everywhere, have brought the Bahá’í world to a new
stage in its efforts to engage in grassroots social action.
(From ‘Social Action’, a
paper prepared by the Office of Social and Economic Development at the Bahá’í
World Centre and sent by the Universal House of Justice to all National
Spiritual Assemblies on 26 November 2012)
