Continuum of Change
This agenda and worksheet can be used to create a continuum of care model for your community. This model includes the range of services that would be needed to support individuals and families at all stages, beyond what one organization alone could provide. It is a way to begin identifying partners and allies in your community.
Crafting Powerful Questions
Positive, strengths-based, open-ended questions can all be useful ways to engage with colleagues, clients, volunteers and boards. Asking why questions prompts people to make connections, identify patterns, and explore new ideas. Learning the art of crafting questions that open up creative thinking and new ideas is an important way to ensure that conversation isnt inadvertently shut-down. This agenda and worksheet can help you delve deeper into new questions for your organization to ask about its mission, theory of change and program design.
Common Good Message Box
This agenda and worksheet can be used to create a common good message for a community issue or concern. This tool can be a useful first step towards crafting new messages about the problems we confront in our work for social change. Use it to develop values-based messages, and reframe the issues that matter to your group.
Client Voice and Engagement
When engaging clients or constituents more deeply in the work of your organization, it is helpful to examine not only the ways they are already involved, but also the quality of that engagement. Understanding who has power and how to share it is key to effectively involving constituent voice in your work. This agenda and the accompanying worksheet can help you to delve deeper into individual programs or areas of your work and begin to generate concrete ideas for next steps in engaging clients.
Four Components of Community
This discussion guide can be used to explore the key components of community building and evaluate where it is currently happening in your organization, and where it can be built up. You can use this agenda and worksheet to delve deeper into individual programs or areas of your work to begin to generate more concrete ideas for next steps.
Theory of Social Change
This discussion guide and exercise applies an adapted version of this familiar framework to your organization in order to help participants consider how service work differs when it incorporates social change goals. Both types of planning and impact are important.
Components of Community
This guide helps organizations explore the key components of community building, evaluate how community building is currently taking place in the organization, and opportunities to expand community building.
Building Strong Neighborhoods for Families and Children
This four-session discussion guide is to help people make their neighborhoods better places for families with children by identifying challenges and opportunities, and working toward solutions. It is from the Study Circles Resource Center, developed in collaboration with the Anne E. Casey Foundation project: Making Connections.
Exploring Community Engagement
This is a series of small-group discussion questions for use during an agency retreat or extended meeting that offers a structured opportunity to explore the agencys potential for community engagement work.
Client Voice and Engagement
This agenda and activity worksheet is designed to identify opportunities for constituents to have more voice and leadership in your organzation and to generate a list of concrete practice shifts that can be proposed to others in the organzation.