Dagmara Bienkowska

Dagmara Bienkowska is working with underdeveloped rural communities to generate vigorous citizen participation and successful development plans. Her approach creates a new attitude toward local traditions which enables community members to use those traditions as sources of income and civic pride.

Dagmara Bienkowska believes that participatory engagement, rather than top-down economic planning, will turn post-communist communities around. She says that in order to reach out to Poland's historically passive communities and encourage them to take initiative on their own behalf, it is necessary first to discover some primary historical and traditional sources of value which involve cooperation and group work and can galvanize the whole community's support. Therefore, she revitalizes dormant local rituals and traditions to foster powerful, lasting community participation in development activities. For instance, she organized the restoration of old and forgotten local food markets, which changed an underdeveloped rural region into a vigorous trade center. Her vision of community development thus begins with the strengthening of frayed social bonds, and develops into initiatives that privilege the process over the final result. As part of her strategy, local groups assume responsibility for implementation of the ideas they generate.

Poland is divided into 2,483 communes or parishes. Most of these are rural or combine rural areas and small towns. During the totalitarian regime in Poland, all were controlled by the central government, which did not encourage citizens to initiate strategies for their own development strategies. Since 1989, strategic development plans have been created for only one third of the communes. However, almost all of those existing programs have proven useless because they are "top-down" - initiated by academically-oriented specialists or the government - and highly theoretical. But these programs are vitally important to the people of the communes: most of the rural areas and small-town communes are underdeveloped and have been crippled by very high unemployment. Less than eighty communes nationwide implement useful strategic development plans, and of these only a handful were produced through community participation.

Even the West European experience reveals that only 1.5 percent of the population typically takes part in community development planning (in Belgium, the number is as high as three percent). Civic participation is very low in rural areas throughout Europe, and the statistics are even worse in Poland. This trend remains an important obstacle to the rebirth of rural communities, which need leadership and incentives to begin organizing themselves.

Since 1996 Dagmara has been implementing her idea in a number of rural communities including Zegocina, a mountainous rural commune with 4,500 inhabitants which suffered from especially high unemployment after 1989. In the face of apathy, dislocation of the population, and submerged political tensions, Dagmara helped turn the community around by the deceptively simple strategy of starting a local cook book. A youth group went from door to door collecting old, inherited recipes. They met several times with each family and discussed the recipes and related family stories, which also triggered discussions among neighbors. The project eventually reached eighty percent of the population of Zegocina. Dagmara published the book, which brings in a small, steady stream of profit to the commune, not only through sales but also because it functions as publicity for the community.

This small awakening of civic activity brought inhabitants together to launch the Association for Development and Promotion of Zegocina, which in turn gave birth to other initiatives such as an entrepreneurs' club, a local mutual fund, an eco-tourism group, a cattle breeding group, and most recently a local investment group. With Dagmara's help, these various groups have collaborated on projects such as a local development plan which has brought substantial improvements to the community and earned Zegocina the prestigious first prize at the 1997 national competition for Exceptional Polish Commune.

Three other pilot projects in 1996 and 1997 yielded similar results. In each instance, Dagmara helped community members rediscover and revitalize an element of their traditions and turn it into a source of income. But the benefits extend far beyond income: as rural Polish communities feel increasingly marginalized from the cultural and economic mainstream, Dagmara gives them something to be proud of - a source of value as much subjective as objective - and provides a precedent for participatory self-government and planning.

To disseminate her ideas, Dagmara has written several articles for a variety of Polish media outlets. She wrote, in one of her papers, that community engagement is vital: "Very important in this process is the first impulse, which should be interesting, engaging, providing even some fun, bringing the feeling of 'we-ness' arising from the local culture and climate."

Since starting in 1996 with two staff members, Dagmara has expanded in her team to include ten paid members and is training ten volunteers. She has successfully recruited excellent staff through a management training organization for Cracow and the region (MATRIK), which she co-founded and where she is a licensed teacher and supervisor. Teaching with this organization also allows her to introduce her ideas to the private sector.

In 1998, her team also became involved in ten new community development projects, five of which are based in the mountainous region of southern Poland and the others spread across the country, including the far north. To accommodate her organization's expansion, Dagmara now functions more as a consultant and a teacher of new team members than a community organizer.

Dagmara is also searching in the more successful rural communities for local leaders who can help spread her idea to new communes. By the year 2000, she wants to work with twenty to thirty communes, spreading her idea throughout Poland.

Born in 1970, Dagmara learned entrepreneurship from both of her parents: her father, a university professor, developed an award-winning method of bee keeping and started a movement of innovative apiarists. Her mother and an aunt were active members of the anti-Nazi underground during the war.

In high school, Dagmara became the leader of the student government and persistently campaigned for students' rights. In 1988, one year before the sweeping democratic changes in Poland, she created an innovative student constitution bill which students and teachers alike approved in a school-wide vote.

Dagmara has degrees in geography and management and has worked at the leading Association for Self-government and Local Administration (MISTIA) in Krakow, which focuses on citizen training. Born and raised in a small town, Dagmara has always had a passion for narrowing the gap between the urban and rural areas. In her work with MISTIA, Dagmara developed her own approach to this issue, trained her own staff, and is now poised to launch her own organization.