The art of community hosting — ‘you can only move at the speed of trust’
I recently attended a two day course on collaborative working for community groups, led by the Community Organisers network.
Having worked in community engagement support roles for several years, I felt I needed to refresh and add to my toolbelt by learning new skills on how to host meaningful conversations in order to maximise participation and build capacity around a project. After two days, I left feeling inevitably exhausted (it was a three day course packed into two!), and so inspired by the knowledge of others, the methods learnt, and what I came to learn about my own role in community organising.
Here are a few key learnings that I look forward to weaving into my future work in the community.
Host yourself
The first lesson of the community hosting training was flipped on its head: first host yourself so you can host others. Think about how you, your actions, your preconceptions and your purpose can affect the dynamic of the group and influence the situation. Value your vulnerability to learn, adjust and gain from a situation.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung warned of the “projection of the shadow onto others” as the root of all conflict, explaining how our unconscious impulses or qualities may be reflected back. In other words, if we’re feeling something, it’s likely to be felt by the rest of the people in the room. As Cormac Russell put it: you can only move at the speed of trust.
The way you see the world, and your reasons for calling people together to meet is all going to affect your interactions, and the interactions between others. So take the time to host yourself, shed the thoughts and feelings that are unnecessary for the meeting, and go in with an open mind and an open heart.
Check in
By hosting yourself, you are gearing yourself up to effectively encourage and support group dynamics and conversations. Ensuring the group does some sort of check in is a sure way to calibrate and get yourself and everyone in the meeting in sync with one another.
Some of our check-ins involved rolling a ball around the circle where we sat, asking each person to say how they’re feeling, what they wanted to get out of the meeting, or something in a similar fashion. This makes sense when you’re hosting a meeting in that sort of set up, but what about when your meetings with the community don’t take place in a formal setting?
The events and meetings that we run as part of the Greening the Fiddlers project in Dagenham are often in a ‘pop up’ style, usually taking place in an outdoor space and often near busy rounds and other environments that aren’t exactly conducive to creating a relaxing and synced up atmosphere!
Our Street Space Christiania cargo bike — a surprising sight around these parts — is often a conversation starter. Perhaps my asking people how they travelled to the location is already a sort of check in for these informal meetings, connecting us through some common ground and setting the scene for further discussion? Or maybe engaging people in conversation about their community is enough of a check in in itself, and the ball rolling will come later.
Brave spaces, not just safe spaces
When bringing together diverse groups of people around an issue or opportunity in their community, it’s important that people know they are entering a space in which they can express themselves, challenge each other in a positive way, listen actively, and learn from one another.
Rather than just a safe space, this needs to be a brave space. A brave space isn’t simply a space in which certain issues aren’t addressed, but rather one where individuals work to recognise their privileges, people lean into discomfort, and lean out to let others speak. And as one participant put it, “when we challenge each other, it is an act of care”.
Quality questions create quality conversations
Throughout the workshop, different hosting methods were used to facilitate discussion. The included a ‘World Cafe’ in which participants discuss topics at several different tables; an Open Space session where participants create and manage their own meetings in parallel sessions around a certain theme or question; and an OPERA session (Own, Pair, Explain, Rank, Arrange) as an efficient and creative way for solving problems.
While these methods each have their own framework, guidelines and principles, across all of them, the key to their success is to ask the right question. The question you ask and how you frame that question will define the kind of break-out discussions that will take place, and the kind of actions that will come from these conversations. Keep the questions broad, and think of them more as conversation starters, rather than something that has an obvious answer.
Embrace the silence, thrive in the chaos!
When you’re bringing together a large group of people around a challenge or possibility in the community, it’s easy to feel the need to be in control. And when things aren’t going as expected, the fall back might be to try to “save the day”, as one participant put it.
The key here is don’t do for others what they can do for themselves. If there’s silence, embrace it and hold a space for it. Don’t always interject to try to keep things flowing. Things will come around naturally, and the pauses are always shorter than they feel in the moment — it was interesting to see how for some of us who were involved in hosting mini sessions, silence seemed to go on for way longer than it felt for the participants!
If there’s chaos, learn from it. There’s a lot to learn from when things don’t go as planned! I often find myself feeling disappointed and deflated when things don’t go as I anticipated — for example, if not as many people show up. But then perhaps having less people in a room provides the opportunity to foster better conversations and build bridging relationships between individuals who can then spread the message beyond the meeting itself. And not to mention that feeling deflated might have an impact on the whole group (see hosting yourself!).
On the ground
Throughout the course, it was hard to stay completely in the moment, and I found myself constantly thinking about how these new methods could be applied to my work in Barking and Dagenham, especially when taking the first steps on a new project.
Seated in a warm room with nice light, access to tea and biscuits, and with plenty of materials and time at our disposal, it seemed a world away from standing next to the cargo bike in the blistering cold, post-its in hand, hollering at passers-by to tell us what they love and what they’d change about their neighbourhood.
The question constantly running through my mind was ‘but how will I apply these hosting methods on the ground?’, and I became concerned that it wasn’t the right training for me and that I couldn’t contribute effectively as others.
But I needed to ask myself a better question. Rather than how will I implement carbon copies of these hosting methods, but instead, what key skills have I learnt from each of these processes, each of the participants, and each of the snapshot moments on the course that I can bring to my work. Well, the answer is a whole lot.
