There have been worrying signs of breakdown in ethnic relations in Pakistan — including accounts of ethnic Hazaras taking up arms and forming their own militia after bombings in Quetta, and Christian protesters clashing with police in Lahore in response to anti-Christian mob violence earlier this year.

Too little has been done to address this growing danger by a Pakistani government already stretched in its fight to contain militancy in the country’s north. Recent anti-discrimination laws designed to better protect minorities do little to address or change ethno-religious tensions. And accusations of the government’s ambivalence toward extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba have only increased minority distrust of authority in Pakistan. What is needed is a stronger civil society that slows and reverses any slide into religious and sectarian strife. And a proven but underused way of fostering a stronger civil society is through grassroots community organizing.

While extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi who claimed responsibly for January’s bombing of Shiites in Quetta pose a potentially grave physical danger to minorities, a longer-term danger lies in violent extremist or sectarian ideology seeping into community consciousness and strengthening the formation of isolated in-groups along ethnic, religious and sectarian lines.

Communities, when faced with an overwhelming challenge or threat, unite and in part define themselves by such experiences. And bigger challenges can bind people together not only within communities, but across them. It is this principle that grassroots community organizing can apply by framing constructive challenges as the uniting points around which communities can shed their differences and work together. The collective action such collaboration fosters is a vital antidote to the increasingly dangerous ghettoization of communities in Pakistan.

This approach has already shown success in helping better integrate a religious minority that has experienced one of the greatest challenges to integration in Pakistan — the country’s Hindu minority.

Based on a self-help philosophy of grassroots community organizing and social mobilization, TRDP’s work cuts through religious, sectarian and ethnic divides, uniting local village communities around common development challenges that affect them all, like access to education, better sanitation, medical care, economic empowerment and emergency relief.