Making assertiveness work for you – an opportunity for women
Short sessions in Shrewsbury: 10am – 1pm on 23rd October, 6th November and 20th November 2013
This set of 3 sessions will include:
- making space for yourself
- saying no when you want to
- managing difficult situations
- hearing things that are hard to hear
- telling people things that are hard to say
There are 6 places available at £90 each. Participants will need to come to all three mornings
Please contact hello@changesuk.net to book
This is the first of changes’ mini-morsels – a series of short sessions, an informal, nice experience with a cup of tea and a biscuit!
New online resource – ‘pick up and think’ – call it distance learning!
Over the past couple of years we have been working on a new, interactive resource. The idea was to try to bring together the many hours of thinking and grappling we have done to make something coherent of our work in, with and related to communities. There have been so many valuable conversations with colleagues and we have had the luxury of digging deep to ensure that the understandings which underpin all of our work make sense and add value – huge value. Having done all that it didn’t feel right to keep it to ourselves. Initially the idea was to develop a learning resource – as a pre-runner to our training courses. In the event this has turned into something a bit different, a lighter touch maybe. It is certainly an introduction to thinking about community and should be useful to anyone engaging with communities, in whatever capacity. have a look – tell us what you think. We encourage people to answer the questions where they arise – you can then refer back to your answers as you work your way through. It also means that we can collect information from a range of people to feed into future research and writings – a return on investment! http://www.changesfoundations.net/
Chapters include: Community development, community empowerment, Exploring influence, What is Community, Power, Equalities, social justice & human rights
Apathy or intentional exclusion?
A thought-provoking TED talk which explores how the very way that our public institutions ‘advertise’ excludes the people affected by their actions. It is Canadian and yet uncannily familiar!
How it feels to be disempowered
I have just been revisiting some notes from one of our echo sessions where we start by exploring the concept of ’empowerment’ so people get a grip on why it is important to work in empowering ways and what this means in practice, it gives everyone the chance to discuss their differing views of the term and come up with ways to explain it.
One way to do this is to turn it around and ask people to think about when they have felt disempowered – what did they feel like? The results can be quite powerful and, on this occasion the group said:
Unloved, excluded, helpless, over-looked, disenfranchised, outsider, low self-worth, silenced, worthless.
They took all of these words, added a few others and turned it into a powerful piece of poetry which they then fed back to the main group to express how it feels to be disempowered:
Have you ever felt helpless, with a low self-worth,a complete outsider, overlooked and excluded?
Organisational silence – they just won’t understand
I’m left feeling under-valued, worthless and unloved
Underneath all this, I am disenfranchised
I need to be heard
What a message to people working with communities, or employing people – or just communicating with people! Of course, we would counter this by suggesting the Community Empowerment Dimensions as a framework to turn this around.
Employee engagement
I come back to this every now and again and today is one of those days. There was an article in the Guardian a year or so ago, reporting on the Global Workforce Survey and evidencing the lack of engagement amongst employees – on a massive scale.
Barely one-fifth (21%) of the 90,000 employees surveyed (in 18 countries) were truly engaged in their work, in the sense that they would ”go the extra mile” for their employer. Nearly four out of 10 (38%) were mostly or entirely disengaged, while the rest were in the tepid middle….
The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including the ability to participate in decision making, the encouragement given for innovative thinking, the availability of skill-enhancing job assignments, and the interest shown by senior executives in employee well-being.
It struck me at the time that the Community Empowerment Dimensions we talk so much about have something very simple and effective to offer. They help us (and employers) to understand how we can work in more empowering ways which:
- build people’s confidence
- include rather than exclude
- are open, democratic and accountable
- build positive relationships, identify common messages, develop and maintain links and promote partnership working
- encourage and equip people to take part and influence
Wouldn’t it be fantastic to try this out, hear and share a few stories? It just seems madness not to!
This people empowerment, improved approaches to working has always been with me and – as an aside – I was given a precious text many years ago by a fellow consultant: The Spirited Business: success stories of soul friendly companies. It is worth a look if you can find a copy!
Community engagement: method, technique or tool
Thinking about community engagement – what it means, how we do it and what we need to help us to do it (bearing in mind that definitions which are too specific can be ultimately unhelpful). We’ve been thinking about this and wondering if we get a bit confused – mixing up community engagement methods, with techniques and tools. Give this a go:
Specific engagement ‘methods’ are the things we invite people to, or set up in order to encourage dialogue, for example:
- structured and semi-structured interviews
- focus groups
- a fun day
Specific engagement ‘techniques’ are the things we use to ‘shape’ the group once we have got them there – the way in which we collect the information, for example:
- brainstorm / thought shower
- carousel
- rounds
Specific engagement ‘tools’ are the ‘gadgets’ that we can use to help us make sense of information:
- pinpoint
- Edward de Bono’s 6 thinking hats
- weather symbols
When I posed this on our networking site, Lorna Prescott observed that
the tools and techniques are the sorts of things which are picked up in generic facilitation skills training and would be found in publications/websites about participatory working, facilitation and so on. So if people are after that sort of thing they should be looking for facilitation skills training, as it’s not just about the tools or techniques, it’s understanding how a facilitator uses them – their relationship with the group etc.
Some of the ‘methods’ category are approaches which I think often require specific training and support to use, such as interviewing and focus group skills. And for which some basic facilitation skills and experience are usually helpful as a building block. ….. It would be interesting to know if people who want ‘engagement methods training’ are trained facilitators or not. And if not, what sort of access people have to facilitation skills training and whether it would be seen by their managers as relevant training
A colleague suggests to us that requests for facilitation skills training are relatively infrequent and yet they have been asked several times to train people in planning and running focus groups when these people, though not fault of their own, lack the basic understanding of and experience in using facilitation skills to be able to confidently run such a group.
Hmmmm ….
Active citizenship – how does that happen?
Here is some feedback from participants on our Take Part (Active Citizen) Learning Programme – for me it makes a strong case for recognising the particular skills needed to really make a difference in our current climate of localism – how to make the best of it. All of this has come back a bit since a recent visit to Holland to discuss Democratic Dialogue. The programme has been run very successfully with women who are interested in becoming more active in community (and public) life. It consists of 9 days, a residential and ‘field visits’ to the House of Commons and, where the budget is available, a valuable trip to the European Parliament in Brussels.
We asked participants what they had learned during the Take Part Programme, this gives a better overview of the course than we could ever hope to do!
Looking at our own communities and how we can become involved, standing up for them and making them better for everyone. This helped me to identify my own self in the community and how I can play a part in influencing the decision making process to my area a better place to live. Also how important citizenship is, how we are all part of ‘it’ and identifying what we are in our community (and country) and what role we have to play. This made me realise that I didn’t want to be an individual or active citizen, but a critical citizen, I feel that I want to stand up and make my voice heard and to play a part, collectively, in the decision making process.
I now know how important human rights legislation is and how it is able to stand up for everybody, regardless of who they are. How different charters of rights can be so different and also similar.
The course helped me to become a better communicator – realising where my weaknesses were and working on them and turning them into strengths. I said at the beginning of the course (I think even at the taster session) that I felt uncomfortable being a communicator, although I did identify my weakness of being too self-critical – always thinking that people listening to me were trying to find fault when really they were just listening. I believe that my communication skills have improved as the course progressed.
In group working I felt more confident as the course went on, being part of a group made me realise that each member is equal and we should encourage others to get involved and recognise and accept each other’s point of view. This became more apparent at the residential when we did a lot of work as small groups, identifying leadership and making group decisions, and how to work together. The ‘fantasy island’ exercise was a good example. Although this was great fun it had a serious side as it taught us how we would need to produce outcomes with limited resources by making collective decisions.
I know and understand more about becoming involved in making decisions and, in this session I identified 2 local organisations who I felt fitted into the examples given to us. The ‘X’ I considered was ‘The Clique’; and the ‘Y’ was the ‘Silent Consensus’ as I am a member of the ‘Y’ I now know that I have my part to play in making this group more influential and more forward thinking!
I am more aware of the structures of accountability in decision making (although some of those structures have already been abolished by the coalition government). I was surprised at how many levels there were and, at the bottom, what a long way up you have to go to influence more. One way of doing this effectively was by lobbying which I learned during the session on parliament. It was during this session when we watched live on TV at the case involving MPs and Lords being investigated for expense claims. I also found very interesting the relationship with the Houses of Commons and Lords and the Monarch – how this relationship had developed over time and how they are involved in the law-making process.
I also learned about leadership skills, what makes a good leader, how to be effective in leading a team, treating the group with respect and gaining respect in the process. This made me realise that being a leader isn’t about giving out orders but more about a leader of a group encouraging consensus, formulating decision making and standing by the decisions made and being supportive of the group.
I have appreciated during the course the importance of equality and equal rights. I have covered in my work this subject fairly well, but again this is something that I hadn’t asked myself about before and has made me realise how important this topic is within my community and beyond.
I believe, therefore, that I have become better equipped to enable me to be a better citizen. I have more understanding since I began the course and I have appreciated the way I have been encouraged to consider how I fit within the big picture that has become my community, country and the world”.
You can read more about our thinking on active citizenship here
More or less empowering ways to engage with communities?
Once upon a time, during facilitated sessions with the Dudley Community Engagement Working Group, we revisited the Ladder of Participation (we have been working with the Wilcox version for the last few years and this is the one we referred to in this session. Having said that, we have been harkening back to the original Sherry Arnstein version in recent times and it’d be interesting to do that more thoroughly and find out what that’s all about!)
Back to our workshop. We had been looking at community empowerment because the group was interested in developing empowering approaches to engagement in Dudley – and doing this in such a way that it was embedded for the future. We had been working with the 5 community empowerment dimensions and the discussions about engagement led us to think about the different ways in which engagement takes place. This is where the Ladder comes in.
We talked about how it was possible to engage in more (or less) empowering ways on all points of the ladder. Even when giving information it is possible to do it in a way which is more empowering than others. I am sure we have all experienced information with is not empowering (perhaps a teacher at school who was scary – or bored; or turgid books to read) – and information which is more empowering (perhaps local newsletters, magazines, a spirited speaker at an event where we felt included).
This way of thinking led us to bring together the 5 community empowerment dimensions and the Ladder of Participation into a matrix
Adding the 5 community empowerment dimensions into the mix, it is possible to illustrate how, at each of the 5 levels, there are different ways to approach this engagement – some of which are more empowering than others. This matrix was later taken up by Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council to use in their community engagement toolkit and only last week it rang huge bells when we whipped it out of our back pockets in a meeting!
Getting the whole story
This is a short story from one of our training sessions a while ago – it really ilustrates how ‘frameworks’ can help people!
Chris was a Social Exclusion Officer working for a local authority. He was based in the Policy Department and felt passionately that community empowerment was a key aspect of his work, although he couldn’t be specific about what that meant or how it manifested.
On top of this difficulty with defining the ‘what and where’ of community empowerment, Chris had also been struggling for quite some time to see how his role fitted – and complemented – the Community Education Department who saw themselves as the main protagonist of community empowerment.
Chris came along to one of our training courses on community empowerment and, as always, we introduced people to the 5 Community Empowerment Dimensions and showed how they can help him to understand what community empowerment is. For Chris, this was a major break-through – and very heartening for us to see someone get so much clarity from them. In Chris’s case, he could see that the Community Education Department were concerned with just one of the five dimensions – the one about increasing skills, knowledge and confidence (which we call the ‘confident’ dimension), but they had no focus on – or remit to work on – the other 4 dimensions.
Chris could see that the other four dimensions: equality, organised collective working, cooperation and influence were all key parts of his role.
This meant that Chris was able to start up discussions with colleagues in Community Education about how they could work together to ensure they took an empowering approach to their work. It worked out really well and offered a platform for those officers to have those discussions – they could also see how their own departments fed into the authorities work in complementary ways.
Rooms for Hire – a community development story
A manager of a community centre commissions trainers to provide a range of classes and activities for older people using the centre. The manager wants to make sure that the centre offers a community development approach to what they do. To achieve this, the manager draws up a ‘statement of expectation’ which she discusses with the trainers and which becomes a criteria for commissioning. The manager uses the 5 community empowerment dimensions to frame this statement and arranges to have regular review sessions with trainers.
It is about putting the values of Community Development into action
Statement of expectation:
It is expected that trainers working on these premises will adopt a community development approach to their work. By this, we mean that you will work in ways which…
| Learning | Recognise the existing skill levels of individuals, ensures that everyone knows what is expected of them.Recognise the increase in skills needed to undertake the activity and share your knowledge and experience with others.Make people feel good about themselves and encourage people to believe that they can ‘do it’. | This is about the ‘confident’ dimension … working in a way which increases people’s skills, knowledge and confidence and instils in the a belief that they can make a difference |
|---|---|---|
| Equality | Make you aware of who is contributing in sessions, who is not and why.Make you aware that running the class/session in particular ways excludes some people from taking part and you take steps to address this.Recognises, appreciates and builds on the differences and similarities of those taking part. Challenges discriminatory language and behaviour | This is about the ‘inclusive’ dimension …. working in a way which recognises that discrimination exists, promotes equality of opportunity and good relations between groups and challenges inequality and exclusion |
| Participation | Encourages people to come together in groups, to share their own experiences, knowledge and skillsIdentifies common interests in the group and arrange activities around theseEncourages people to undertake group projects requiring a range of skills which recognise the strengths within the group | This is about the ‘organised’ dimension … working in a way which brings people together around common issues and concerns in organisations and groups that are open, democratic and accountable |
| Cooperation | Illustrate how the activities you are working with link to others so that groups join and work together on wider, connected projectsThe group you are working with understand how their activity links into the wider world, for example an exercise class could link to food & nutrition, yoga or dance | This is about the ‘cooperative’ dimension … working in a way which builds positive relationships across groups, identifies common messages, develops and maintains links to national bodies and promotes partnership working |
| Social Justice | Provide opportunities and encouragement to the group to make suggestions in the development of the class/session, to suggest ideas and structures for future classes, resources and facilities. | This is about the ‘influential’ dimension … working in a way which encourages and equips communities to take part and influence decisions, services and activities |
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