To the power of two

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.