The Circle (for meetings/gatherings)
A deliberate seating arrangement where everyone is equally visible and heard, without a head or a foot, fostering connection, trust, and deeper relationships. This practice became a cornerstone for f...
Journal
Design briefs
Concise, actionable declarations (often stemming from "How Might We" statements and clustered insights) that transform a broad area of interest into a specific, tangible challenge or opportunity that ...
Map of Belonging cards
A deck of cards created from community conversations, each featuring a distilled insight on one side and a fragment of the original transcript on the other, directly connected to the factors and theme...
Social change and personal transformation go hand in hand
When we step into “different”, more emergent ways of working and being, there is a process we are stepping into ourselves as individuals as well. This process is an ongoing practice that inevitably wi...
Training Community Researchers
As mentioned elsewhere, the underlying drive to create Community Researchers was to create a cadre of ‘good listeners’ within the community – to gather stories of lived experiences. A lot of work done...
One cause of Difficult Conversations
A key shift in moving towards more relational practice, referred to in threads running through many of these blog pieces, is building trust and a shared sense of psychological safety. One early way of...
Storytelling
Do you remember what your favourite book was as a child? Or perhaps your current favourite film or TV programme? My favourite book, as a child, was Alice in Wonderland. A well-read, well-worn book th...
A perspective on System Change
Currently, a phrase very ‘of the moment’ – highly desirable to get engaged in…and a complex concept with varying degrees of success…yet, perhaps, a victim of its own popularity? As with many popular c...
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....
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...