RESEARCH BRIEF
This workshop was conducted in collaboration with a team at SCAD who were working to uplift a local community in Savannah. They acted as our clients, and to support the content of their project, asked a team of five facilitators to design and host a workshop that captures the community neighbourhood’s values, their experiences with external forces, and elements of the community’s rich oral history.
WORKSHOP GOALS
• Build trust: To build meaningful relationships and foster transparency between the stakeholders and the community members.
• Capture powerful stories: To build empathy and to reiterate the importance of history and passing it down.
• Create advocates within the community: To help unite and energize the community and to think of themselves as agents of change.
SKILLS
Workshop Design
Facilitation
Contextual Research
DESIGN
Local black communities often must tell and retell their history to outside organizations seeking help to alleviate the present problems. As facilitators, we realized this would not be the best approach to helping our clients build trust with the community. Having to once again retell their painful story would not have helped the cause but only worsened the pain.
Keeping that in mind, the workshop was designed in a way that allowed the participants to collaborate at narrating pieces of a community story. This would help focus the activity on shared ideas and encourage them to tell a story together about a new character they create. The participants were given certain generic probes to help them fill in the pieces of the story. For e.g. What does the character do for a living? or How does the character get around? We had to keep in mind the age, reading and writing level of the participants while designing the activities and pay extra attention to the props that we would provide to the audience. For e.g.: The text on props was printed with large font size, the words used were very simple, the language was to the point.
EXECUTION
The design was executed in five steps:
1. Introduction: The audience was asked to concentrate their thoughts on a piece of paper, crumple it, and put it aside in a box. This was a check-in method to bring them to the present by pausing the past for a short time and completely engaging with the facilitators.
2. Energizer: To follow a dance routine with easy steps. The dance selected was a gospel song because we understood that the community members were very close to their faiths. The slow and simple steps were intentional to allow everyone to participate to their maximum ability.
3. Ice Breaker: Role assigning to each person in a group. It was to start an introduction and increase interaction among the community members. The roles assigned were: motivator, observer, supporter, talker, entertainer, creative and futuristic.
4. Build a Story: The activity was for each team to create a story using the probes provided. They had to develop a character and form a story around the character’s life. This story was then shared with the audience. This allowed the community members to narrate a story that may have had nothing to do with their own lives (but ideas could be a reflection of their past stories) and collaborate with possible strangers to tell a cohesive story.
5. Capture & Takeaway: Initial pieces of crumpled papers were replaced with positive notes and audience members were encouraged to pick a piece of the paper before leaving the room.
