Facilitation the developmental way...

During the past week the MCC regional leadership team participated in a training offered by the Community Development Research Association (CDRA) based in Woodstock, Cape Town.

 CDRA has developed a significant theory and practice relating to developmental planning, monitoring and evaluation. The focus is on enabling people to chart their own path towards self-determined outcomes that build up their communities. The action/learning cycle is at the heart of this approach. It resonates a lot with MCC's development philosophy and offers practical and effective handles on how to do that.

This weeks training focused on facilitation - how does one provide effective and appropriate leadership to a developmental process. It is a challenge to facilitate a discussion that essentially gets the 'facilitator' out of the way yet helps the group to address the issues and concerns that are important to them.  To often we find such processess to be overly shaped and controlled by the people leading them. In this case our task was to learn how to engage people, help them articulate their own questions and chart a way forward.


With excellent facilitation, a lot of laughter, creative energy and serious reflection we wound our way through five days of training. The training team kept us on our toes. Journalling, creative presentations, artistic expression, leading the entire group in discussion while one's style and approach were being analysed and commented on, listening carefully, telling stories, and many other tools were modelled to help us understand how to provide effective leadership and engage people in dialogue.

Five days in graphic form

Towards the end of the session we all teamed up and did a major presentation on some facilitation style or developmental issues. There were four observers who took notes and they together with the entire team provided honest, immediate and direct feedback.

So now it's back to the hard work of translating this into more effective engagement with partners so as to meet the challenges we all face on a day to day basis.