By
Deborah Hinton and Luce Engérant
Social learning for social impact was little more
than a concept for us as volunteer facilitators when we decided to pair up. Given
the intensity of the timeline and our understanding of the workload for this GROOCx
it made sense to us to work in pairs. What
we've found is that there is power in working as two:
· The team benefit. Our
teams get to hear two different facilitator voices and benefit from our
different perspectives and experience and access to different resources to
support them in achieving their goals for this course. They never have to worry
that we’re not available to help them since one of us is in touch every 24
hours or so.
· The benefit to us. The
experience of working together has been great cross-generational,
cross-cultural learning experience – Luce is a McGill student from France with
international experience and Deb is a senior consultant from Montreal. We both
have a passion for social business and working for impact. In addition to
finding practical ways to support our teams, we’re also doing the coursework
and reviewing our impressions and insights together. Our experience so far is
that we are able to work together without the logistical challenges a bigger
team would bring. And, we get to have in
depth conversations around the things that we think are most relevant to our
own learning and our teams’.
How we
work together. We divide our teams between us and rotate so that
we, and the teams, have a richer experience of the GROOCx. We meet a couple of
times a week at room 010 to check in with each other on course content,
facilitation issues and most importantly news from the 8 teams we’re
responsible for. We use these meetings to discuss the teams - questions they
may have, resources we can share, and how we can make it easier for them to connect
with each other – always with a view to finding the best ways to support them. It
also gives us a chance to connect with Alex and Carlos on what’s happening in
the GROOCx more generally. If we can’t meet in person, we meet by phone. Between meetings, we created a team tracker so
that we can follow the team’s level of engagement, outstanding issues and our
responses to them. By keeping it on Google Docs we both have access anytime and
we’ve shared it with Alex and Carlos so they can see things at a glance.
What we’ve discovered is working
in a pair is giving us social learning and social impact that is more than the
power of two, it’s to the power of two. Impact2.
Thank you for sharing your experience, girls, and inspiring us all to follow your initiative! :)
ReplyDeleteHope to meet you soon at Bronfman 010!
Kika