OL 343 Assignment Eight Homework
Online Learning: OL 343 Adapting to Climate Change: The Community Focus.
https://csd-i.org/ol-343-the-community-focus/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Eight Discussion
Magee Example Assignment Eight

Assignment Eight. Leading a Participatory Teambuilding Workshop: Forming a Village Committee

Part one.
The first thing to do for your workshop is to make sure that you are well-prepared. That you have people to meet with, you have a place to hold a workshop, and you have the materials that you will need.

If you’ve decided to offer snacks or a nutritious luncheon, you have chosen recipes and have a plan for purchasing the food and putting someone in charge of preparing it so that you aren’t distracted from facilitating the workshop. You also have cups or glasses, tea and water, plates and cutlery, napkins, and a way to clean up at the end.

If you arranged the workshop for Saturday, then you still have a week to fine tune the details.

Part two.
Hopefully you brought colleagues to help you facilitate the workshop.

The lesson plan that you adapted from the handbook or field guide that you found last week on leading a participatory workshop in “setting up community committees” focused on your projects specialty will be very helpful in telling you what to do at each stage of the exercises so that you can stay on track.

It would be good to begin the morning with an icebreaker (sing a song or play a game). We want to make sure that everyone is comfortable being there, that they feel safe enough to say what’s on their mind, and that there is a certain amount of enthusiasm in the room in order to encourage participation.

Take notes throughout the day right onto the lesson plan to remind you about things that went well, things that didn’t go well, and how long the different segments took. For example, you might find that the workshop only took four hours to do rather than eight hours you estimated.

Large sheets of paper and markers are also a great way to take notes. As your community members say interesting things you can jot them down on his large sheets of paper and use them later as reminders of what was said, what people’s reactions were, and what was and wasn’t working. They will also allow you to draw organizational charts as visual aids

I know that you will be tired at the end of the day but I would take a few minutes when you get home to go through the lesson plan and make a few more notes. The next time you give this workshop or when one of your colleagues wants to give this workshop you can clean up the lesson plan to reflect what really happened. Even a year from now your notes will be very useful.

I would also recommend meeting with your team the next day to get their perceptions of how the workshop went and if any improvements could be made the next time that you give it.

Be sure to take photographs. You should get your volunteer helpers to take photographs of you as well. Be sure to take:

some close-up detailed shots of some of the participants,
close-up detailed shots of the materials that you use
interesting drawings that you might have done in your large sheets of paper
take shots of the whole group
a few shots if you facilitating the workshop

I would suggest that you read our Field Guide: Capturing Compelling Photos from the Field: https://nonprofit.csd-i.org/field-guide-capturing-compelling-photos-from-the-field/

Good luck at the workshop and enjoy yourself!

The homework to turn in will be:
1. A short summary of how the workshop went and how it was received by the community members.
2. A short paragraph on what worked well and also of things that you might do differently next time.
3. A few photographs of the workshop.
4. A brief description of the results of the workshop including member comments on their feelings about the committee, how the selection/election of members went, and initial thoughts on next steps of the committee
5. Verification that you provided the new committee a full list of project activities and asked them to make a list of the activities that community members would like to do are on their own, or in conjunction with NGO field staff as part of their partner contribution to the project.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment Eight to see what this could look like.
See you next week in OL 344.