Looking afresh at the real work of social change

FACILITATOR Doug Reeler

The “Occupy” and Arab Spring movements have captured the headlines this past year. Service delivery protests in our own backyards continue to annoy the authorities. Social media promises new ways of communicating and mobilising. Yet none of these seem to suggest a clear way forward to practitioners working for social change on the ground. Protest does not always equal positive change and yet it is clear that the energies for change are there. Communities, the State and Business recognise the need for new relationships but cannot let go of the old. Some practitioners are getting it right, but many of us are a bit frozen, stuck in old paradigms, projects, routines and relationships.

This 5-day workshop is aimed at unfreezing and unlocking our strategic thinking and stimulating new ideas. We will interrogate different theories of social change. We will invite several innovative social change leaders and practitioners, who are doing things differently, to tell us about their practices and will collectively engage with these to make sense of them, looking behind and beyond to find what it is that is really needed. From this we will help each other to rethink our own approaches and relationships and return home with fresh thinking, ideas and possibly some new allies and initiatives.

Applying fiction techniques to writing about work

FACILITATOR Sandra Hill

How do you convey what it is you do in your job? How do you impress on others the work of your organisation, or the value of its contribution, in a world already awash with information? How do you begin to make sense of it yourself? How do you share an experience from the field with colleagues, in a way that makes them sit up and learn from it too? Inspired by the age-old traditions of storytelling, this course will help you find the story in what you do and to craft it into compelling pieces of writing, drawing from the relatively new discipline of creative non-fiction.

This course is also available as an in-house process for teams and organisations interested in a fresh experience of organisational learning, and/or a grounded, phenomenological approach to monitoring and evaluation.

Short Stories from the Field is an intensive 4 day immersion in the practice of writing.

Moving from tired to inspired

FACILITATORS Rubert Van Blerk and Sue Soal

Monitoring and evaluation, beyond just keeping our projects and organisations accountable to donors, remains a critical challenge for many practitioners working in development. This course explores ways and methods that use M&E not just for ticking off boxes and counting outputs, but for real participatory learning and sense making within organisations, and between organisations and beneficiaries.

Participants will reconnect with the thinking and practices that underlie a developmental approach to social change, and ultimately the question of how M&E should better serve these needs and aspirations. Course work will illuminate, contextualise, appreciate and critique current practices and notions of monitoring and evaluation. Skills such as asking questions, listening, reflective thinking and planning, which underlie a learning orientation towards M&E, will be taught and practised during the course. An organisational perspective that will help participants to identify and understand M&E challenges within their back-home context will be offered. Participants will leave with not only increased personal knowledge and skill, but a clear picture of the next step/s towards improving M&E processes within their own organisations.

An applied approach to writing for work

FACILITATOR Sandra Hill

Internal documents, donor reports and writing for publication are all part of our organisational work requiring good thinking and writing skills.

In this course, you will learn how to;

• Use the writing process to inform your thinking and understanding of your work.
• Communicate your thoughts and experiences to clients, donors and colleagues effectively.
• Get your reports, articles or proposals actually written (without too many painkillers).
• Find the pleasure and discover the fun of writing.

Writing for Development is an intensive 4 day immersion in the practice of writing.

Two 4-day courses will be offered in 2012

Bringing life to group processes.

FACILITATORS Shelley Arendse and Desiree Paulsen

Do you enjoy working with people and facilitating processes that enable and
energise people in a workshop or meeting or training course. If you’re looking
for something different, creative, lively, practical and yet still learning new skills
to facilitate in a more developmental way, then this is the course for you . The
facilitation course allows one to explore and create, to learn and reflect, to lead
and follow, to collaborate, to have fun and feel safe to take risks.

Whether you’re new to the sector or needing to enliven your practice, this
course is an opportunity to share and learn from the experiences of fellow
facilitators. Learn the core methodologies for facilitation, then have an
opportunity to practice facilitation in pairs and receive feedback that will build
and enhance your facilitation.

‘Working in the moment’

FACILITATORS Desiree Paulsen and Shelley Arendse

‘Does it feel like there’s an elephant in the room?’ Something needs to be expressed and the group is unable to share it. Have you ever felt stuck, or challenged, or at a loss and not meeting your group’s need when facilitating a group process? Then this course is for you.

We invite those facilitators wanting to reflect on their practice and share their interesting and challenging experiences. If you want to vivify your facilitation practice, learn simple and practical methodologies to broaden your skills, attend the advanced facilitation course and explore how to work with unfolding processes that emerge unexpectedly.

This course will provide a learning experiential space to practice the new skills and methods learnt and receive feedback that is both constructive and affirmative. We will share, network, innovate, discover, learn from, design and work in a creative, fun environment. The personal development aspect of the course enables one to be more conscious and aware of how you bring all aspects of yourself into the facilitation role. We hope that through the process you will learn to be less of a ‘facipulater’ (manipulated facilitation) and more of a facilitator. Join a diverse group of facilitators and take your practice to the next level.

“… Heard, half heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.”  TS Eliot

FACILITATORS Sue Soal and Liz Smith

"Human organizations emerge from processes that can be comprehended but never controlled.” Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

This is a course for consultants and development practitioners who wish to work more directly and intentionally with social process; for those who know that this work requires more than a set of fixed formulae and methods … yet also more than a vague, optimistic openness. There is good reason why people shake when they stand in front of others and try to contribute to, or facilitate social process. They are engaging with huge and invisible forces. Often we see an air of vulnerability in those responsible for enabling the parti cipati on of others in process. This is their alertness to the moment – paying attention to what is happening in the process – in order to summons the best possible next contribution. However too often this sense of not quite knowing becomes awkwardness and even a feeling of fraudulence. This course will off er opportunities to experience, see,
conceptualise and make sense of social process itself. Working with the dimensions of time and space; and movement within these, it will draw on and exercise faculties of perception that lie within us but remain largely unused. It will emphasise how observation of the process of others necessarily entails and includes observati on of one’s own process. Out of this joining of self to other; and of inner to outer, comes new insights into the field of process, and grounded abilities to work more effectively with individuals, groups, organisations and whole communities.

We see participants emerging out of the course with an enhanced practical, experiential and theoretical understanding of social process. Further, the practical implications of this for the whole work cycle will have been explored, including how work is described, proposed on and contracted for, planned, pursued, adjusted and learnt from.

“Their life is always transitions ... Heroes do not fix, but fl ow, bend forward ever and invent a resource for every moment.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

NB. As the above course incorporates movement, the venue will be Erin Hall, Rondebosch.

Cost of this course is R3,500 for individuals and local NGOs and CBOs, R5000 for internati onal NGOs, donors, government and corporate organisations.

With regard to in-house courses please contact:
Email: info@cdra.org.za

Telephone: +27 21 462 3902
Fax: +27 21 462 3918
www.cdra.org.za