The Art and Craft of Listening
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply” - Stephen Covey. As a world, we focus more on how to speak than how to listen. It happens all around us....
Journal
Methodology not Ideology
Developing a workshop-based program to learn what kind of understanding and ideas evolve when we start from individual experiences. After the enthusiasm of finding that many people were interested in ...
Who else did we speak to in 2023?
63 people shared who they connect to the most in their work, representing a snapshot of connected life in Plymouth. https://wordart.com/5z5h5h8wx5m9/plymouth-network We shared considerable frustrat...
The People's Assembly Spring 2023.
Turned out to be quite a controversial thing holding a People's Assembly just before Purdah. It was naïve of us to think that a person's political beliefs could be assimilated into community work. Tur...
The freelance experience
Introduction Everyone who worked on Belong in Plymouth did so in a part-time capacity. For some, it was part of a salaried role, but more than half of the ‘core team’ were self-employed. Part-time ho...
What do we mean by 'the system'?
While working on the Belong in Plymouth programme, we often found ourselves talking about ‘the system’ when we were discussing how things currently work and how we might effect change in our city. But...
Defining the 'vision' for Belong in Plymouth
In February 2022, the core team of Belong in Plymouth came together to create a Theory of Change for our work. This proved to be challenging due to the emergent nature of the work and the trickiness o...
Psychological safety and trust
Background In the winter of 2023-24, in my role as Learning Partner for the project, I interviewed 11 of the 18 ‘core team’ members of Belong in Plymouth. A common theme was psychological safety and ...
Personal Development within an Emergent Programme
Friends and family frequently ask, "So, what actually is an 'emergent programme'?" and "What does that actually mean for you day to day?" This post aims to answer those questions by sharing my experie...
Navigating uncertainty and emergence
Uncertainty and emergence have characterized all aspects of the Belong in Plymouth journey. From the time we wrote our successful funding bid, things were kept pretty open. The core team wanted to all...
Making Sense of Belonging: From Insight to Action through Community Research
“There is massive value in the way that that has brought people into what it means to research and gather information and data…even if they've just touched on it…you can take some story of like, Marga...
Hope in The Heart Exhibition Spring 2022
Hope in the Heart brought together artists with lived experience of poor mental health to share their thoughts in a reflective way with professionals. It was one of our first attempts at bringing diff...