Facilitating a process for genuine community engagement – What skills does it require?

 

Banyule Community Health invites you to join Cherie Salmon and Donna Anderson from the Centre for Community Child Health for this full-day workshop.

 

Workshop overview

 

For genuine engagement to be understood, practiced and sustained across a team of practitioners, it is necessary for those involved in leadership to enthusiastically model the same practices internally.

 

Our ability to genuinely engage using our relational expertise helps us to navigate relationships within our team, our organisation and with partnering organisations. It enables us to care for colleagues and support them to navigate their workloads and relationships.

 

Organisations that support genuine engagement through relational practice understand the importance of building and sustaining effective relationships. They model this with their workers and colleagues, and value their workers building relationships with families/clients and community.

 

“Relationships form a cascade of parallel processes, so that the quality of relationships at one level shapes the quality of relationships at other levels. This parallel process implies that direct service providers will be more likely to engage and partner with families and communities more effectively if their managers and others use similar practices. (Moore, 2017)”

 

Authentic engagement is the starting point for all effective relationships. When we genuinely engage with others, we invite their full participation and involvement and together explore and understand the opportunities and issues, develop and test solutions, and share leading the relationship.

 

Despite the benefits of engagement, genuinely engaging with others – including those that maybe reluctant to engage – is hard to do well. Genuine engagement involves much more than delivering a service. It means the people seeking help from service providers are co-designers, co-deliverers and co-evaluators at all levels of service provision. This requires relational practice to be universally ‘practiced’ in and across services and involves everyone in the service:

 

• creating a welcoming, inclusive and safe environment
• spending time developing and nurturing relationships
• fostering leadership and ownership of relational practice within the service and community.

 

This workshop focuses on the important topic of engaging others and gives a particular emphasis to engaging community groups who have traditionally been viewed by services as ‘hard to reach’ or ‘out of reach’. It is built on the premise that regardless of the quality of an intervention, how it is delivered is of equal importance and makes the difference.

 

We invite participants to enter into a reflective learning process alongside facilitators and other participants. This process explores the effect of our individual practice on others and what might need to change in the way programs and interventions are marketed and delivered to better engage with community members who would most benefit from them.

 

Participants will be encouraged to use the content and modelled facilitation of the workshop to reflect on and examine facilitative processes that can help or hinder partnership, both in one-to-one work with others, parents and or community.

 

This workshop is limited to 15 participants. Please note: If interest exceeds the available places, we may prioritise people working in West Heidelberg.

 

Learning objectives

 

Participants will have an increased:

 

• appreciation of the characteristics of facilitation that reflect partnership;
• awareness of the skills and qualities of an effective facilitator;
• understanding of facilitation tools and techniques and their ability to facilitate discussion
• using partnership and adult learning principles;
• understanding of engagement as a culture of practice;
• understanding of worker and service characteristics that support parent engagement; and
• ability to promote strategies for engagement within and across services.