Our Approach

Creative’s mission — “To support people around the world to realize the positive change they seek” — has always placed local networks, ministries, communities, partners and individuals at the forefront of its approach. They establish their local agendas, set their priorities and generate solutions to their challenges. In turn, these efforts are supported by Creative’s global expertise, proven techniques and opportunities to engage in reciprocal learning and valuable capacity-strengthening opportunities.
 
Localization is about partnerships. Creative establishes strong relationships built on respect and support of people’s aspirations. Through these relationships, our local partners hone their expertise, expand their understanding of the system in which they work, strengthen their organizational processes and build their reputations across established and new networks. The ultimate goal of localization is to ensure that people identify, develop and own the positive changes they seek.

Creative ensures different gender perspectives, interventions, and resources are integrated by intentionally engaging women, men, gender-diverse individual youth and marginalized groups across the activity cycle from assessments and analyses to planning and co-creation, implementation, evaluation, and management. GESI analyses and considerations underpin decisions on operational practices to mitigate barriers to participation and ensure all social groups can access and benefit from programming.

Creative designs and implements GESI-specific interventions that directly target and benefit women and other vulnerable groups (e.g., training on leadership skills, service-learning activities, psychosocial support, and trauma healing activities) and the mainstreaming of gender equity and social inclusion into broader interventions (e.g., training of community leaders and local authorities on inclusive governance).   

Youth have dreams, aspirations and ideas. When properly developed and channeled, youth and their communities grow, prosper and become more stable.
 
Long before the phrase “positive youth development” was coined, the approach to enabling youth in meaningful ways that allow them to grow and thrive was part of Creative’s DNA. For decades, Creative Founder Charito Kruvant has spoken passionately about the importance of engaging in youth as leaders and investing in young people for the stability and growth of communities.
 
Seeing youth as equal partners, Creative supports approaches that build on young people’s strengths and potential, fostering their engagement, developing their sense of agency and strengthening skills and relationships with others. Creative’s youth approach is inclusive and reaches a broad range of communities — including LGBTQI+, youth with disabilities, ethnic and racial minorities and those residing in rural areas — in its programming. 
 
Creative promotes cross-sectoral synergies and systems approaches with the goal of sustainable, equitable solutions to the challenges and aspirations identified by young people. These youth-focused and led approaches are holistic, transparent and informed by do-no-harm best practices. 

At Creative, we ground international expertise and best practices in local realities and decentralized decision-making for flexibility and locally driven adaptive management. At the same time, we provide operational HQ- and field-level oversight to ensure compliance, consistency, and quality control while managing adaptively via the regular use of pause-reflect-adapt sessions and involving staff in learning, data review, and analysis.

Our teams and trusted local partners provide information and insights on why activities work and where and when adaptations are needed. This approach helps us infuse local perspectives into programming and flexibly respond to shifting landscapes while promoting local ownership from the outset.