GEMs facilitation for transformation aims to:
“Empower women and men of all ages and backgrounds to have more control over their lives. Inspiring a dynamic and sustainable movement of champions to bring about a better and more sustainable world.”
GEMs facilitation for transformation adapts common empowerment principles at different levels:
- Community peer sharing between champions: this is the basis of the movement-building
- Participatory Champion Learning: used to catalyse a GEMs process, strengthen skills or add new more advanced skills, participatory action learning. These can take the form of workshops or on-line supported learning.
- Advocacy networking events: large visioning, assessment and planning events bringing together multiple stakeholders to develop collective ways forward.
‘Fun with a Serious Purpose’
The Fun Part
GEMs facilitation for transformation builds on traditions of experiential learning. Instead of top-down mechanical school-type teaching, GEMs provides spaces for participants to be creative (and subversive) with ‘culture’.
GEMs facilitation inspires powerful visions for change through:
- Symbol Pictures and Drawing Games
- Songs and Dance
- Participatory Drama
These encourage participants to have ‘fun outside the comfort zone’ – questioning conventions and prejudices and breaking down barriers between people from different backgrounds. So that everyone can open up to new ideas and experiences.
These activities reinforce each other so that intuitive understandings of equal rights and social justice and belief in potential of change are progressively internalised by ALL participants as ‘natural rhythm change’ for their lives.
Serious Transformation Purpose
Develop a strong vision: how ‘the new me’ champion feels dancing to a new rhythm to make their lives, families and communities better for a more equitable world.
Critical thinking: through listening to different voices and asking honest questions. Not just copying what teacher says.
‘Action from Day 1’ every tool contributes to a SMART action plan that they themselves can implement for change. With steps to implement immediately and track to strengthen over the longer term. Not just ‘awareness-raising’ or ‘talking shops’.
‘We Are the Champions’ participatory, listening and leadership skills start in the first five minutes with pairwise discussion. So that participants are able to share GEMs with others around them immediately after the first session so that they can help other people also to change.
New friendship networks form within which women and men and people from very different backgrounds have learned to relate to each other as equal human beings.
Linkages with leaders: Local leaders are invited to learn from champions at community days. They do not give speeches at the beginning of a workshop, but give responses to what champions are doing at the end.
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Symbol Pictures
“A Picture [can be] worth a thousand words.” But drawing is not just ‘pretty pictures for illiterates’. GEMs symbol drawing is a universal visual communications skill to communicate complex issues.
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Songs and Dance
GEMs songs and dances inspire with visions of change, subvert cultural stereotypes, and celebrate new ways of doing things in future. Everyone writes and participates. No one voice leads alone.
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Role-play Dramas
GEMs role-play dramas enable people to experience how other people feel and rehearse being ‘the new me’. Spontaneous improvisation discovers new ways of addressing inequalities and challenges in their lives.
“Everyone Learns the Dance”
The key task of GEMs facilitation for transformation is to:
- inspire participants to become GEMs champions.
- constantly reinforce an excitement and enthusiasm for change – the new life rhythm as an ongoing process of self-empowerment and exploration.
GEMs ‘experts’ first use the methodology to develop their own self-awareness, transform their own ‘life rhythm’. All facilitators need to appreciate the potential power of GEMs for their own lives before they can inspire others to use the methodologies to change theirs.
Facilitators at all levels – within the community as well as organisation staff and external consultants – need to develop listening and observation skills and experience in distinctive participatory facilitation techniques and processes adapted to specific mixes of participants.
Facilitators become ‘perpetual students’. That means continuing to listen and learn from other champions from all backgrounds in a collective movement for change – no longer them ‘them’ but ‘us’.
Changing life is like learning to dance.
First we need to feel the basic underlying rhythm – the principles of respect, inclusion, equality and empowerment for all. and start with the appreciation of the positive and a belief in the possibility of change.
Next we need to learn and regularly practise particular routines learned from others who have been dancing for some time to really experience the benefits and changes so that the rhythm becomes automatic.
Then we can really be creative with our own dance in step with the dances of others – fit, energetic and creative in creating a wider movement for change.
The dance is exciting and open for anyone. Anyone and everyone can do this.
But it is also important to follow the ethical principles and the basic rhythm steps before trying to go free-style. The skill is to know when we have understood the rhythm enough to guide our detailed practice with confidence and when we need to go back to listen more carefully to the rhythm again.
DO NOT mistake practice routines from printed manuals for the underlying subconscious rhythm gained from active experience. Training of Trainer trickle-down does not create an inspired collective dance.
DO NOT: become over-concerned with ‘correctness of tools’. Focus first on gaining experience and confidence and understanding your own experience to get the natural rhythm.
DO NOT not to take short cuts in reflection on your own experience just to save time. That leads to confusion and the dance becomes stiff and just another boring routine. That way we will get easily tripped up, often bump into others and our whole dance becomes chaos.
Learning the dance is a lifelong process getting ever stronger through integrating inspiration from the rhythm, disciplined practice and creativity of your own dance. And to really watch, share inspiration and dance in harmony with others.
We Are all Champions:
levels of Facilitation
Empowerment skills for life planning, increasing happiness and wealth in their families and communities and contribute to equitable and sustainable development where equal human rights of all people are an integral and no longer questioned element. And including particularly those currently most disadvantaged: women, young, old, poor, people with no formal education, minority or marginalised social groups.
Conventional TOT approaches using GAMEChange diagram tools can have a deep and sustained effect on direct participants coming to workshops and a few of the people around, then spread through paid replication. But numbers of people reached are generally small, unless there is a big budget and momentum decreases after a couple of years as original champions move on to get employment, run growing businesses full-time. Organisation staff also often move on.
GEMs facilitation for transformation adapts common empowerment principles at different levels:
- Community peer sharing between champions: champion peer sharing with family, friends and community networks is the basis of the movement-building and the main aim of facilitation at other levels.
- Participatory Champion Learning: used to catalyse a GEMs process, strengthen skills or add new more advanced skills, participatory action learning. These can take the form of workshops or on-line supported learning over a period of time.
- Advocacy networking events: large visioning, assessment and planning events bringing together multiple stakeholders to develop collective ways forward.
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Champion Peer Sharing
Champion peer sharing with family, friends and community networks is the basis of the movement-building for change. All other levels of facilitation aim to strengthen this movement of champions.
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Workshops for Transformation
GEMS workshops for transformation give voice, power and responsibility to participants for their visions and plans. Facilitators ‘guide from the back’. Then participants can become leaders of change back home.
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Advocacy Networking Fairs
Advocacy networking faits are large visioning, assessment and planning events bringing together multiple stakeholders. Collective visioning, sharing experiences and ‘win-win’ planning aims to massively scaling up the movement for change.
Building the Movement:
Empowerment Checklist
Building a movement for change means champions are empowered to:
- have ownership and confidence in their own visioning, analysis and action plans
- understand the importance of ongoing reflection and tracking to improve progress
- have the simple tool steps in their notebooks to share with others.
Drawings are also the basis for monitoring and assessing empowerment changes. Specific guidance on types of information documentation depends on the tool and purpose of the documentation.
- to inspire and enable ALL participants to continue innovating with the tools to better achieve their visions, and able to facilitate similar activities for others when they get back home.
- on ‘active learning’ and participatory leadership for participants.
- ‘active listening and observation’ by the facilitators in order to decide how best to ‘spark and fertilise crystal growth’ through minimal but focused contributions.
Empowerment Checklist
This should not be just a policing questionnaire, but identify issues that arose with any particular set of participants or context factors to bear in mind going forward:
- Do all diagrams include a vision and start with the positive?
- Do all diagrams include action points that champions can implement? Are there some actions they will implement as soon as they get home?
- Does everyone have the basic steps of each tool in the back of their notebooks?
- Is the importance of tracking progress clear? Do people understand how to do this? Have people decided how often and when they will check progress on the diagram?
- Does everyone participate? Is everyone respected? Have power relations changed? Are new voices speaking? Is everyone listening?
- Does everyone feel inspired to become a leader of change for others around them when they leave? Do they have confidence, speaking and listening skills? Do they have a peer sharing plan?
- Was the lead facilitator able to guide from the back? Did they speak more than 10% of the time? Did they hold the pen? Were they able to leave the room and/or focus on documentation letting participants facilitate? At what points did they come to the front when they could have facilitated participant voices from the back? At what points was more active facilitation needed? Are there ways in which that could also have been done in a participatory way?