Making a Meeting — Weinland Park Community Engagement and the 40% Rule
Most everyone is familiar with the feel of an unprepared meeting. It’s a bunch of people sitting around listening to one or a few people figure out what to talk about, having a series of small conversations in front of everyone else, and then feeling annoyed and overwhelmed when there’s little group input to or ownership over the outcome.
No thank you!
Thankfully, meetings can work. They can be a shining way to communicate, plan, delegate, get work done, and celebrate — it just requires a bit of preparation!
This week I had the pleasure of helping to plan and facilitate a Community Engagement Meeting through my work with the Weinland Park Food & Wellness Committee. In a neighborhood challenged on both sides (from the bottom: violence, poverty, arson, drugs // from above: gentrification, abandonment, over-policing, profiteering landlords), millions of dollars of federal HUD grant money may be available to develop food-related community infrastructure.
Amidst feelings of division and mistrust, we’re working to establish legitimate and powerful grassroots involvement in how this will impact the neighborhood. Some people are concerned first about youth engagement and enrichment, some love the idea of a local foods market for its own sake, some see this as an elaborate move to help keep wealthy people from feeling guilty about gentrifying the neighborhood, etc etc.
With so many perspectives and such a level of both opportunity and risk at hand, this meeting surely needed a lot of preparation. As one of 10 facilitators, I attended two separate 2-hour facilitator discussion and preparation meetings (opting out of a third to plan the introduction to the event) and a final 30 minute final prep session. As a rule of thumb, a friend of mine spends twice as much time preparing a training as he does actually running one, and surely much more if it’s unfamiliar content.
The Community Engagement Meeting attracted about 80 people and lasted about 2.5 hours. I’m guessing that preparation through initial conversations, interacting with coalition partners, identifying and training facilitators, preparing materials, planning a budget, providing food, and setup & clean up probably took about 80 hours of work total, not to mention many side conversations and years of foundation-building that made it all possible.
So I’ll create a new rule of thumb here:
- There were roughly 80 people meeting for 2.5 hours — 80 people X 2.5 meeting hours = 200 meeting people hours
- 80 people hours spent preparing / 200 meeting people hours = .4 hours preparing for each hour of meeting
- If this can apply to other situations, a planning team should cumulatively spend 40% as much total time preparing as people will spend cumulatively at the actual event, in order to have a successful large event.
Mind Map meets Food & Wellness
Ever heard that term before, “Mind Map”? It’s an incredibly useful tool for group cohesion and shared understanding. It works like this: a topic and a prompt is introduced, and people say what they have to say about that thing. Simple! The art is in facilitating that conversation, and capturing it visually.
It is what it says, a “map” of our collective mind on a particular topic.
I’m a member of the Weinland Park Community Civic Association Food & Wellness Committee. At our meeting last month, our phenomenal group coordinator gave a brilliant intro about the need for folks to be on the same page, that nobody is “in charge”, etc., and gave a great prompt to open up the floor for residents to discuss the direction and niche of our committee. But alas, the conversation then carried on without a container, wandering here and there, bummer! So, we got our heads together and planned a little session for this month’s meeting, to provide a sense of a strategic plan for our group.
You see, we have, individually and collectively:
- VISION >> of the world we’d like to create
- MISSION >> of how this work will help make that happen
- GOALS >> in the form of projects that fulfill that mission, and
- TASKS >> that make up those projects.
These 4 put together, potentially along with Niche, funding, and others, make a Strategic Plan. Our committee tends to reside in the Vision (meetings!) and/or Tasks (hands in the dirt!) ends of this spectrum. With Vision alone, we are dreamers; with Tasks alone, we are blind workers. To bring the 4 levels closer together by filling in Mission and Goals, we used a Mind Map! The prompt was: “What is this Committee up to? What do we do that you’re involved in, and what don’t we do that you’d like to?” The blue roughly represents Mission, and the red is Goals. Tuh-duh!
A non-exhaustive Mind Map of what we're up to.
This is a popular education technique. I was first introduced to it by Rising Tide, a radical all-volunteer climate justice organization, and have also had great experiences with it thanks to the Beehive Design Collective. A mind map’s depth, clarity, and accessibility of information and analysis is pretty astounding.
All this has me asking myself: Why didn’t I use this before?!? I’ll admin it, I’ve rarely used mind maps because I have a hard time giving up control as a meeting facilitator and a hard time trusting that a group will really take it on and create something great. Yikes! That’s okay though, every exercise has its place. For me, mind maps are most useful when you as the facilitator really. don’t. know. It’s a blank slate for a group to create something all its own — in this case, they more predictable the exercise, the less useful it is!
One neat and unexpected outcome was the clarity of our blue “Mission” words (Connect Resources, Support, Advise, Outreach, Coordination, & Forum). So, in addition to achieving a shared understanding at this meeting, we tasked someone with synthesizing a Mission statement/cloud/something for the committee using those words. Bonus!
Three pieces of advice:
- Don’t be afraid to use this. If you’re nervous, you’ll control it and it won’t really shine.
- Recruit a creative person to record ideas, and let them do it however they want. The classic linked bubbles is a reliable approach, but there’s more there we can’t even imagine yet!
- To get people started, give a good prompt that you’ve thought about ahead of time, and then just get out of the way except to return the group to that prompt.
Doing Your Detective Work: Finding Out What a Group Really Needs When They Request an Anti-Oppression Workshop
by Nico Amador
Reposted from Training for Change
One of the elements of direct education, TFC’s training methodology, is a value on being learner-centered, rather than curriculum-centered. When we get asked to do a training, we do not usually rely on a pre-established curriculum that we use to teach the content we’re being asked to deliver.
In this article, I want to share some of the questions that I’ve found useful in my initial conversations with groups who are requesting anti-oppression or diversity workshops and what I’m listening for in their answers. The sequence of questions as they are here might be useful to guide the flow of the conversation, but I don’t always stick to this sequence as a formula, I think it’s better to be organic and follow the direction the conversation takes as it’s happening:
Continue reading “Doing Your Detective Work“
Board Nominating
I recently had the privilege of participating in the Board Nominating Committee for the the Ohio Alliance for People and Environment. OAPE is newly re-formed from Ohioans for Health, Environment, and Justice. I consider them the legit grassroots statewide Environmental Justice organization here in Ohio, and was of course honored to help them do this foundational work!
My task: to find Board candidates in Central Ohio. Hmm, well, I’ve never done that before! Where to start? I checked out Boards from a variety of successful organizations I’m familiar with and was quite surprised. The occasional grassroots activists and volunteers were predictable, but those were far outnumbered by lawyers, vice presidents, strategic planning executives, owners…
Who is the best at fundraising, niche building, and strategic planning in a grassroots organization? Chances are, it’s actually not simply our volunteer base! But, we also wouldn’t entrust this to just any highly-trained corporate professionals. Seems to me like Boards are at their best when they draw on many strengths: nose-to-the-grindstone volunteers, corporate executives, lawyers, fundraisers, legislative experts, authors, etc.
I got creative in my search, and am quite satisfied with the two nominees I offered to the OAPE Board. Polluters and politicians, this is an organization to watch out for!
What have you seen work in Boards? Any particular examples of success?
The Problem with Strategic Planning
Reposted from Social Velocity:
The term “strategic plan” has become so misused and abused in the nonprofit sector that it has almost become meaningless. So many organizations have undergone a poor strategic planning process that the idea of “strategic planning” has almost become laughable. But the fact remains that to be truly effective at creating social change a nonprofit organization MUST have a strategy for the future and a plan for how they will get there.
Generous & Irresistible
This weekend I participated in the Landmark Forum. I went in hoping to better align my short-term actions and long-term goals. Landmark offered me nothing short of transformation, an opportunity to live on purpose, and I hope I get to show you what I mean in the non-digital world if I haven’t already.
I’m still new to this program and fresh off the experience, but have been surprised and impressed so far. Are you familiar with Landmark? Would you like to be?
At this moment, I’m creating for myself and my life the possibility of being generous and irresistible, and now you’re in the loop too. It’s my choice, and a wonderful way to live!
Planning Spaciousness
Do you ever budget out your time, only to find that you wildly underestimated the task at hand, mis-guessed what would be involved, or felt torn in passing up potential opportunities? Okay, loaded question – of course we do! I’m always a little discouraged when this happens, it leads me to question the value of planning at all…
But I know planning is very valuable because I’ve experienced planning success, and so I want to treat failure as a learning moment. How can we plan spaciously? How can we have flexibility alongside focus? Here are a couple ideas:
- An old friend shared an idea with me a few years ago, we’ll call it the 50/25/25 system. First, figure out how much time and capacity you have to offer (100%), and then you plan out 50% of it. 25% is then reserved for emergencies, and 25% for unexpected opportunities. Something like 80/10/10 may be more realistic for most people, but even 90/5/5 would be a great improvement over fully booking and then over-booking (the old 100/25/25 burnout recipe). Word of advice: don’t skip the first step, identifying your actual capacity! If this seems daunting or impossible, it might be time to take a bigger step back to assess.
- My own trick is to leave one day open or mostly open toward the end of each week…but let’s not call it casual Fridays. :0) This lets me take on stuff I don’t or can’t expect, and also to put off stuff I simply don’t get to as quickly as I hoped. It’s really nice to have this empty space, and every once in a while you might even find a nice day off because of it!
How do you plan spaciousness?
