Rural Europe on the move English_chapt1_6 | Page 54

CHAPTER 4
11. Imagine you dreamt community
12. 13. Sharing knowledge explaining
the sustainability tool
Distinctive community skills
“What makes your place distinctive and identify what they need from “These tools help to envisage how
and special?” members of the PLANED their local community. Too often sustainable development is relevant to
team ask in a workshop to bring development decision-making you, in your local community,” PLANED
to the fore what participation and processes or results-driven projects people say, “Here we feel that if a
engagement actually look like. “A ignore this human aspect. Approaches small group of people explores what
good place to raise children,” “beautiful like these foreground personal needs to be changed and makes that
wildlife” and “small community” are connection, bring a sense of pride and change on their own, it can have a
some of the first ideas they jot onto engagement to the local community bigger impact than just organising
the flipchart. It does not matter and empower individuals to get stuck a training session on sustainable
whether you have been here for days in on the local level. development.”
or decades, every perspective counts.
Together, the ideas on the flipchart
illustrate some kind of collective vision.
We follow this by talking through
the ‘Community Audit’, a series of
questions which sketch out in more
detail what the place looks like and
what people do in it, where they work
or what kind of services and transport
options are available. This is a chance
to get participants talking about their
own perception of the community,
around a cup of tea.
A similar exercise - the ‘Skills &
Resources audit’- goes one step
further, on the personal level: people
discover their skills (personal,
practical, technical and hobbies),
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FS TRAINING SESSIONS: SHARING KNOWLEDGE
Forum Synergies’ training sessions usually have the character of
knowledge sharing rather than front teaching. We train by sharing
good practices and professional knowledge. We build training
sessions around the existing experience and needs of participants.
During the workshop in Wales in 2015 the local partner organisation
PLANED organised a training session on community visioning.
During our Civic Dialogue workshop 2016 in Poland people shared
their knowledge on group facilitation and on local community
involvement. Participants used tools of mediation such as active
listening, reformulation and observation of body language and
analysed the different perspectives of stakeholders.