Making Change Facilitating Community Action

Every community has issues or opportunities that need to be addressed. The expert knowledge of community members could be the key to creating lasting change. By making community members into facilitators, Making Change: Facilitating Community Action suggests they can guide community members through the process of making change and to help them determine their goals and methods. The aim of this book is to enable facilitators to identify concerns andaddress, enable and foster change at the local level through effective facilitation. This book follows a six-stage model for creating change. Beginning with issue awareness, it continues through getting to know the team they are working with, seeking information on the issue and community, through facilitating the planning and community development through evaluation. This book focuses on the human side of the change process while also teaching the practical skills necessary for individuals to reach their goal. Making Change is for people interested in making change to improve their community, including students, community activists, local government and educational leaders.

Stage 1: Issue Awareness 1.The Beginning 2.Observe, Wonder and Reflect 3.Detours Stage 2: Getting to Know You 4.Reflective Facilitation 5.Calling the First and Subsequent Meetings 6.Recruit and Retain Volunteers 7.Clearing Mental Space for Facilitation 8.Building Rapport and Unity Stage 3: Information Seeking 9.Mental Models and Frameworks 10.Spectrum of Attitudes 11.What’s Happening Now? 12.Visioning 13.Change Resistance and Readiness 14.Wondering and Hypothesis Testing 15.Planning Perspectives 16.Force-Field Analysis 17.Identifying the Play and the Players in a Community 18. Getting Grounded, Gathering Data Together Stage 4: Facilitation of Planning 19. Getting Started on Planning 20. Strategies and Tactics 21. Learning Objectives 22. No Tin Cups: Fundraising and Stewardship 23. Building Alliances and Collaborations 24. Choreography of Conversation 25. Listening Deeply 26. Setting the Stage for Productive Meetings 27. Observing the Action 28. Asking Good Questions 29. Trouble on the Team Stage 5: Community Development 30. Choosing and Developing Solutions 31. Communications 32. Program 33. Policy Change 34. Physical Environment 35. Support 36. Monitoring and Managing Change Stage 6: Evaluation and Conclusion 37. Leadership, Sustainability and Renewal 38. Evaluation 39. Disengagement: It’s Been Nice, But I Really Must Be Going

Jeanne Anderson is a professor emerita of St Cloud State University, St Cloud, Minnesota. She began facilitating while working in the business world in training and performance improvement. She found through her volunteer work that there were many overlapping practices between change initiatives in business and the community. Maurine Pyle is a Quaker facilitator with over 40 years of social change experience in a wide variety of professional and volunteer settings. She is committed to a form of leadership known as servant leadership. She holds master's degrees in Organizational Development and Linguistics.