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 applies common empowerment principles to facilitation at different levels:
- Peer sharing between champions: this is the basis of the movement-building
- Learning workshops: used to catalyse a GEMs process, strengthen skills or add new more advanced skills, participatory action learning
- Advocacy networking events: large events bringing together multiple stakeholders
The key task of GEMs facilitation for transformation at all levels is to inspire and constantly reinforce an excitement and enthusiasm for change – the new rhythm. As an exciting process of self-empowerment and exploration. As a process of breaking barriers that prevent men as well as women of different ages and from different backgrounds and potentially conflicting interest groups from achieving their full human potential.
‘Action from Day 1’ means that learning has immediate effects. Every participant leaves with an action plan for change in their own lives that they will implement and track.
‘We Are the Champions’ integrates peer sharing and leadership skills from the first five minutes so that participants are able to share GEMs with others around them so that other people can also change.
‘Fun with a Serious Purpose’
GEMs facilitation for transformation builds on traditions of experiential learning.
This means participants having ‘fun outside the comfort zone’ – replacing top-down mechanical school-type teaching with being ‘creative (and subversive) with culture’. Questioning conventions and prejudices and breaking down barriers between people from different backgrounds. So that everyone can open up to new ideas and experiences.
GEMs facilitation inspires visions for change, critical thinking and creativity through:
- Symbol Pictures and Drawing
- Songs and Dance
- Participatory Drama
These 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.
As time is always short, these fun processes are specifically focused to deepen learning of the pictorial tools and participatory leadership skills around the vision for the process. They are never just energisers.
GEMs facilitation for transformation aims to help women and men to:
- vision how their lives, families and communities could be in a more gender equitable world
- identify achievable steps to change that they can implement immediately and also over the longer term
- develop partipatory, listening and leadership skills
- build confidence and creativity in visual communication, songs and theatre
- form new friendship networks within which women and men treat each other as equal human beings.
- develop facilitation skills to become champions of change in their households and communities
Every learning session or meeting should include a range of different elements to make them lively and inspire further change and action learning.
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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.
improving Workshop facilitation
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.
‘Experts’ supporting the process first use the methodology to develop their own self-awareness, transform their own ‘life rhythm’. They need to appreciate the potential power of the process themselves before they can inspire others to change. They become ‘perpetual students’. That means continuing to practice and listening and learning from other champions from all backgrounds in a collective movement for change.
Building a change movement means participant ownership and confidence in their own visioning, analysis and action plans, understand the importance of ongoing reflection and tracking to improve progress and 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?
- Did everyone participate? Was everyone respected? Did power relations change? Did new voices speak? Did everyone listen?
- 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 ‘facipulate 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?
Toolkit resources
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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.
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.