Making change is a collective endeavour that can bring many challenges! One of the biggest stumbling blocks can be the group itself: passionate individuals trying to work together. These resources will help you set a group up well, tune it up if it already exists, make decisions together, navigate conflict, and develop skills to be an effective participant and facilitator.
Group morale is a key contributor to the success of a group, increasing cohesion, reducing burnout and preventing activist turnover. Build team relationships; resolve conflicts and improve communication; and celebrate success.
Activists need to individually and collectively deal with feelings such as loss, grief, frustration, anger and despair. We can set up our groups to provide support to each other including emotional support, support for action, and educational support.
A group’s culture can have a big impact on the likelihood of stress and burnout for members and staff. It’s possible to create a group culture that supports self-care, balance and sustainable work loads and patterns.
Many conflicts get worse than they actually need to be because the participants lose control of themselves and retreat into self-reinforcing patterns of attack and counterattack. Here are some suggestions, drawn from the literature of conflict resolution and psychotherapy, that can be used to de-escalate conflicts.
‘Feedback’ is a communication to a person or a group which gives that person information about how they affect others. It is important to be able to give feedback in such a way that people can hear it, take it in, evaluate it, and change behaviour which affects their relationship with others.
Active listening is a fundamental skill for peacebuilding and social change. It is more than hearing, it involves processing what has been heard and skilfully selecting a response. Active listening serves to encourage the person to tell more and most importantly, communicates to the person that you are interested and listening.
Insights about facilitation from the very challenging General Assembly process at Occupy Melbourne. This article will be of interest to facilitators and others learning about group process, as well as people keen to find out about the Occupy movement. These reflections were written two weeks after Occupy Melbourne kicked off in October 2011.Â
Joel Dignam reviews Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s ‘The Starfish and the Spider’. The book delves into ideas and language around decentralisation with useful examples from history, social movements and commerce. It also includes practical tips for putting decentralisation into practice.
Consciousness raising was a key element of the second wave women’s movement enabling women to recognise that the personal is political. This article gives an overview of group consciousness raising processes relevant for any group based on a shared identity or experience of oppression.
Build strong advocacy teams using this checklist to assess your team’s readiness to campaign for—and win—change in the modern landscape.
An overview of the tools and tactics Greenpeace offices around the world use to ensure their office teams are working seamlessly together. Explore by Country/Region and Trait to find the successful practices or “bright spots” highlighting ongoing experiments in team integration.
Facilitators help a group to get where it needs to go, whether the focus of a gathering is information sharing, discussion, generating creative options, making decisions, team building or planning for action. Here are some tips and tricks for facilitation, to help you get the most out of your next meeting.
Slack is a great way to facilitate easy internal communication – but getting started can be confusing. This guide was collated by the OPEN Network, incorporating best practice from a number of organisations who’ve used Slack for years.
For volunteers or staff to be driven to do their work, it must be motivational, both ‘extrinsically’ and ‘intrinsically’. However, we often the intrinsic elements of the work. Read on to learn about how to design tasks to make them more intrinsically motivational. Your staff and volunteers will benefit!
Here are some simple tips for getting the most out of meetings, relevant to collectives, committees and action groups.