Community Possibilities
Community Possibilities
Navigating the Landscape of Community Consulting
Are you ready to understand community level change? Buckle up as my business bestie, Dr. Susan Wolff, and I share our experiences working with community coalitions and community-based nonprofits. We share our highs, our lows, and those 'aha' moments that keep us going in our quest to effect change.
We've poured our expertise into a co-authored book, "Guidebook to Community Consulting," a must-read for anyone seeking to make a difference in their community. (Enter GTCC2023 at checkout for a 20% discount!) We explore the essentials of connecting with community members, upholding values of equity and anti-racism, and honing your skills to become a successful community consultant. We also delve into the powerful concept of cultural humility and its impact on DEI training. We tackle the resistance to DEI training head-on, offering strategies to overcome it.
We also look at the importance of inclusivity within community engagement, discussing how to make meetings accessible for everyone, and using data to measure inclusivity. We discuss our experiences with experiential activities to boost participation and ensure every voice is heard. So, come and join our enlightening conversation, as we unlock the potential for change that lies within communities.
Susan joined me on Episode #3, listen to it here:
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Connect with Ann: Community Evaluation Solutions
How Ann can help:
· Support the evaluation capacity of your coalition or community-based organization.
· Help you create a strategic plan that doesn’t stress you and your group out, doesn’t take all year to design, and is actionable.
· Engage your group in equitable discussions about difficult conversations.
· Facilitate a workshop to plan for action and get your group moving.
· Create a workshop that energizes and excites your group for action.
· Speak at your conference or event.
Have a question or want to know more? Book a call with Ann .
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Music by Zach Price: Zachpricet@gmail.com
Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me on today's episode of Community Possibilities. Dr Susan Wolff is my guest. You may remember, susan, if you've been following the show for a while. She was actually on episode number four back in April of 2021. We had talked about coalitions and systems level change. We're talking about that again today. We're also talking about a book that we published this past spring by Cambridge Press. So we're going to be talking about the book. We're going to be talking about what we like and we don't like sometimes working with community groups. We love it most of the time, but every once in a while we run into a hiccup or two. So thank you for joining me on today's episode. Be sure and like and share. Send it to a coalition leader, you know. Thanks everybody. Hi everybody. Welcome back to Community Possibilities. Guess what? I have my first repeat guest. Hey, susan Wolff. Hey there. So Susan and I go way, way back. One of these days. I'm going to actually look it up. I think it was maybe. Aea in Denver, maybe, or was it before that?
Speaker 2:Maybe it was before that I can't even remember all the AEAs.
Speaker 1:Now They've become a viewer, yeah and for those of you who are listening to this, like what the heck is AEA? That's the American Evaluation Association Conference. So that is how we met on a round table when I introduced myself and you said you're a community psychologist, you need to come to our topical interest group. And there we go Now. Susan is my business bestie, my work wife, my co-author, all of the things. But, susan, for those who may not have caught our first episode, do you want to introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm Susan Wolff, community psychologist. I'm a developmental psychologist, I'm an evaluator, I'm a consultant, I'm a wife, a mom and a Chihuahua mommy. Okay, yes, you know I had to get it in there. You know they had to come.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you forgot a couple of grandkids, plus a bonus or two.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, yes, grandkids, bonus grandkids, and now it's getting into bonus great grandkids. So oh, they're growing. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, congratulations on all the things. Thank you Very good. So one of the things that I think is most interesting about having the podcast and I always say it was one of those weird shower thoughts. I had no business case for doing it it was just in the middle of COVID and people were yelling and screaming at each other and it just felt very divisive and I really wanted to put something positive out in the world. But the most interesting question, one of the most interesting questions I ask, is how do people come to be who they are? So how did you come to be a community developmental psychologist?
Speaker 2:Well, you know it goes way back. I told the whole story. It would probably be a whole season of podcasts, so I'll give you the short version.
Speaker 2:Growing up in Flint, michigan, near the factories, and having had several adverse life events, beginning well before 18 years, but also becoming a teen mom and having to deal with the world as a poor, single mother, there were things that I thought just weren't being done right, things that were not. It wasn't kind and gentle world that supported people who most needed support, and I wanted to change it. And then somebody told me about this program at Michigan State that would teach you how to use research. And, of course, when I was an undergrad in college which was an accident too accidentally went to college and I did well there, which was surprising given my beauty school diploma, but that's a whole other story. So, anyway, getting back on topic here, this research was my favorite class in my undergrad years. I loved research, design, I love statistics.
Speaker 2:And then somebody told me there was this program at Michigan State that would teach me how I could use research to change the world. And I was like, oh my God, I can change the world and I can do research. This is for me. So I decided to apply and almost fainted when they just accepted me because I had applied late and it was like, well, I'll just do this, because somebody said, go ahead and do it, but I'm not going to get my hopes up.
Speaker 2:And then when I got that call, it was a lot of screaming and crying and people going what's wrong, what's wrong. And I was like so that's how I became a community psychologist. In the course of my work I was working on, I ended up doing some research on adolescence and, of course, my own kids became adolescents eventually as well, which I found to be a fascinating time. So thus the developmental interest was mostly in looking at how do young people navigate adolescence in a way that turns them into productive people, that gives them this ability to become autonomous, successful individuals, which was my dissertation. So that was kind of how I ended up doing both of those things.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't think most parents of teenagers would describe the period of adolescence as fascinating, so good for me here.
Speaker 2:I love teenagers. They're so interesting.
Speaker 1:I love them when they were not my own not that my kids were not great, they were great but yeah, it's full of angst and all sorts of trials and tribulations. But anyway, we'll get back to the subject at hand. So you were my guest in my very first year of the podcast, in April of 2021. You were episode four and we talked a lot about coalitions and systems level change, community level change, things that we are both really passionate about and I thought it would be fun if we had kind of a back and forth conversation. So you answer and I answer these questions. So what?
Speaker 2:are you like?
Speaker 1:least about working with community groups or community coalitions.
Speaker 2:I think too often there's a lack of understanding by people who are in coalitions about the power of the coalitions, trying to get them to understand that this isn't about program level, moving people to think beyond programs. People have been so socialized to think that the only way to change anything is with a program, and I think that getting people out of that mindset and getting them into understanding that you know you're together here, a whole group of you there's a power here to change something bigger than creating a program or helping programs work together or helping people find programs True true, true, I so agree.
Speaker 1:I think I would add to that I would what is it in poker? I don't know, I don't play poker. Were you like great? I don't know. You match and raise, I don't know. Clearly, I don't know my metaphor here, I would agree and I would say, not being like inclusive, because I do a lot of substance abuse, mental health kinds of things and rarely are the folks who actually are affected by the problem part of the coalition, and if they are, it's usually after the program has been sorry, hit my mic there. The program has been developed to fix these people right. So, yeah, so that lack of diversity and kind of staying stuck, I would agree. Staying stuck, kind of like we just need this program without looking at all the kind of systems that impact those people. So that's a challenge. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So that one took me about six years just now with one of the coalitions I work with, Well, that brings me to my next question.
Speaker 1:Maybe this ties in to where your head is going. What do you like the most about working with community coalitions?
Speaker 2:As hard a struggle as it can be to get them to move forward. I love those aha moments when you do see something move forward, that is you know. That's what it's about. It's about moving them into the aha moments 100%.
Speaker 1:That's exactly what I put down on my little notes this morning. Oh like, oh crud. What am I going to say? That's exactly what I said. It's like, yeah, when the proverbial light bulb comes on and all of the feeding and the watering. I'll switch to a garden metaphor. I know more about gardening than I do about poker, although not that much more. Yeah, it's when that light bulb comes on.
Speaker 1:They see the value of working together. They see the value of looking at the systems that impact people. And what would it look like if we do things a little bit differently To support those fill in the blank young team moms, people struggling to find a job, people who are unhoused, whatever the thing is that is breaking their hearts? So that's a beautiful thing. Yeah, so at that conference in Denver. So that can't be where we first met, because I remember being in the bar at Denver, so it had to have been before One of these days. I know how to figure that out. We should look at our beat and see when that workshop was there. You go All right.
Speaker 1:So somebody had a cucumber martini. That was not me. I don't know what I have, but it wasn't a cucumber martini. You don't really drink anymore, so you probably haven't had one of those in a while. Put it down. We started talking about how often people ask us for advice, usually young and or emerging evaluators. How do you get started? How do you find your clients, all of those kinds of things. Of course, we've already let the cat out of the bag. We're both community psychologists, we both work with community groups and community coalitions and we I don't know a book was born. A book was born and the book oh yeah, because I've got my background I don't know if everybody can see this on if we do a video clip Guidebook to Community Consulting a collaborative approach.
Speaker 1:There we go. This came out in the spring, published by Cambridge Press, and that really resulted from cucumber martinis and whatever else I was drinking and you were probably drinking wine, yeah, probably yeah and just brainstorming all of the many questions and how can we put our answers into one place that people could go to. So I want to talk a little bit about the book. So let's talk about first who it's for. Well, I'm going to let you answer that question, but I know I remember saying that we agreed that we wanted it to be very simple and friendly, like you were having a drink with a friend or having coffee with a friend. We did not want it to be academic-y, research-y, put a wire on all of those things. We really wanted it to be very friendly. So talk about a little bit about who the book is for.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the book number one. The primary audience might be people who are consultants, people who do consulting in community contexts, but a secondary audience is almost anybody working anywhere who is going to enter communities as an interventionist, as an academic, as a researcher, an evaluator, even if you work in, say, a health department or work at a university or work at a school system. There's something in there for you to think about when you think about doing work with communities. So I think the audience is fairly broad. It could cross into social work, education, public health, community psychology, of course, in a lot of different fields. If they are going out and working in community, there's something in there for you Awesome.
Speaker 1:So in the book we talk a lot about the qualities needed to be a community consultant. So which three do you think you are good at and maybe where do you struggle sometimes?
Speaker 2:Good at. Sometimes I feel like I'm not good at any of them. I think being able to talk to people sort of that sociability. I feel like sometimes I can talk to anybody. You know somehow and Anne, you always tease me about this and laugh about it but I always manage to find something in common with people and I think by starting with that commonality together, there's sort of this ability to make connections. That is so true folks.
Speaker 1:If you ever see Susan out and about in the world or at a conference, it takes her I swear, about 10 seconds. Most of the time I'm just watching her like OK, she's going to find a connection. It is uncanny how you can do that, yeah.
Speaker 2:And I can do that with community members just as easily, and a lot of them talk about being grandparents. So we can get right into being grandparents together. Or you know kids, I can get into being parents, and when my kids were little I remember that too. You know we're more connected. I feel like people are more connected than they realize, that we're more alike than we're different, and I think I just like to find that likeness in us so we can make those connections. I don't know each other. I know patients is one no, that's not me. Yeah, it might be somewhat. My values very committed to equity and in liberatory methods, and you know, anti-racism. So there's a lot in my values that I think are strengths, and I don't know what the third one is. Like I say, I always feel like I'm just working on all of them. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah, so we just did a session for the American Evaluation Association the online learning sessions, not the summer institute, the summer and yeah, I think some of our attendees were kind of like overwhelmed with our tool that we include in the book. That kind of helps you assess, you know what things you might need to work on as you work in communities, and I think some of them felt like, oh my gosh, I'm not good at this or I don't do advocacy work, so I guess I don't. And that's not what we're saying at all. We're just saying that hey, there's some things that you might want to work on and there's some things you probably maybe will never want, settings that you'll never want to be in.
Speaker 1:It's funny you said you're not patient, because that was mine. That was one of like I think I'm very patient and I think when you work in communities, especially when you're working with coalitions and collaborators, you have to be really patient. You kind of have to accept people where they are, wherever that is, and yeah, it takes a long time to do this work, which is difficult when they're under. Maybe they have state and federal funding that they only have for a certain amount of time, so there's that pressure to get the work done, but it takes so long to learn how to collaborate. So patience. I say complexity. I like things messy. The messier the better. The more complex the better.
Speaker 2:That's what that would be one of mine.
Speaker 1:I love the messy thing, and then I say group dynamics, like understanding that, the old norming forming storming, and being able to communicate that to the groups that I work with so that when they are in conflict they don't get rocked by that. Hopefully they don't get rocked by that, that that's just a normal part of becoming a group. But on the flip side, where I struggle sometimes is dealing with strong emotions. We talk about the ability to handle conflict or strong emotions, and I have to remind myself that that's their work, that they have to do. That's not directed at me per se and I need to model that boundary for whoever is in the room. Is there an area that you struggle with?
Speaker 2:Probably patience a little bit. I always have to remind myself it takes a long time. Be patient, be patient. Yeah, I think that's probably tough for me, but I'm developing. As I get older, I'm finding it's naturally happening. I'm getting more patient, I'm getting more, less worried.
Speaker 1:Maybe less worried? Say more about that. What do you mean? Less worried, worried about what? Calm?
Speaker 2:More calm, just just generally more calm, like when things like you say, when, when there's conflict and stuff in the room, I'm like, okay, we'll let this play out until it, you know, let's see where it's going and then we'll make sure we intervene when it's time. But sometimes heated discussions need to happen, right, and I'm, you know, over time, getting better at dealing with that kind of strength. You know Conflict and where to intervene and where to when it's time to tell people remember our community agreement and you know how to step in gracefully. Yeah too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and leading them to some kind of Resolution, not just letting the conflict, you know, kind of hang in the air and poison Everything you met. You mentioned community agreement. So for those folks who don't know what that is, do you, do you want to talk about that? Because I try to do that too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's where, when you bring a group together to work together, it's always good to start with what's called a community agreement, where they will agree on how they're going to resolve differences. How are we going to relate to one another? What is going to be out of bounds? You know, we will treat each other with respect. We will take time to listen to everybody in the room. Things like that go into the community agreement so that later, when there is some kind of disruption in the relationship, say of the group, you can go back to the community agreement. See, okay, remember, we need to get back to this.
Speaker 1:And for those of you who, like me, maybe you get uncomfortable when people are having strong emotions, that's a good tool to have in your toolbox, right? So you know, I mentioned helping them to come to, you know, consensus or decision. Those community agreements are really good. We talk about the book and assume goodwill, assume everybody is there for a good reason, they have the community's best interest at heart. Yeah, so the community agreement is really important.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned equity earlier and I wanted us to talk about that because so the backstory behind the book is we had a Set of editors years ago in a contract and I won't go into details, just to say that it was going in a direction that neither one of us really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:It didn't, it didn't stay true to the tone, the easy-going nature of the book that we really wanted it to have, and so we walked away from our contract. Lo and behold, a couple years later, cambridge reaches out to Susan because she already has a book on community psychologists, and said and they said hey, susan, you got anything else like this and we had this kind of at the ready, but we did have to go back and kind of rewrite the whole book and kind of take, take all that researchy stuff out and change the tone and some things had to get updated and a lot of the work, a lot of the writing that we had done on equity and you know, back in the day, oh gosh, I remember 20, probably more, maybe even 30 years ago. The term was cultural competence.
Speaker 2:Everybody was all had to be culturally competent, and Whatever that means.
Speaker 1:So we had to rewrite that and you do such a nice Job of kind of explaining that to groups. I know there's pushbacks pushback in some areas, maybe even in businesses where they're being required to do DEI training and all of things but you can you talk about why we use the term cultural humility and how that term has shifted over time?
Speaker 2:Well, the the shift is because you can never be culturally competent. I mean, what does that mean, right, if you're not from a culture? I mean, being from a culture means these things are kind of embedded in you the ways of being, the ways of thinking, the ways of knowing. They're all embedded. You grow up in that. But being cult, but cultural humility, means that number one. That word humility is so critical because it it means that we're able to humble ourselves, to be able to go in, be around a culture that doesn't act or think or maybe even know the way we do, and Enter it with honest curiosity, honest respect. That Different from me doesn't mean bad, good, whatever, don't put a value on it, just let it be, let it be and respect that this is somebody else's ways now.
Speaker 1:Oh, I wanted to ask you and I'm asking you a question I know the answer to Maybe that's, maybe, that's cheating. Have you ever been in a situation where people were not too excited about this idea of cultural anything?
Speaker 2:oh, yes, oh yes, been in situations where Somebody told the board that they really needed to engage in anti-racism training and board members walked out People, there's a lot of pushback and I think it's a lot of it has to do with the approach.
Speaker 1:So what? What did you do in that situation?
Speaker 2:Well, I wasn't the one, fortunately, that told them that. So the person that told them that looked at me and said these are your people, you need to help do this. And it's right, you know, they were white, I'm white, they were white. So I had to talk to them basically the next day, introducing this concept by thinking about where they are, what is important to them and where are they in this journey.
Speaker 2:Because when it comes to things like anti-racism, cultural humility, all of these things, everybody's in a certain place and we have to start by meeting them there, talking to them in a way that makes them comfortable to join this journey. And so you know, if you say you've got someone that's never trained to do a long walk and you want to get them to walk across the country, well, you're not going to start by saying, guess what? We're starting here and we'll be in California. You know they're going to go. Oh, my God, my poor feet, I can't do this blah, blah.
Speaker 2:But maybe if you say, well, you know, let's start this journey by going this far and see how you feel, and then they'll do that, and then they'll be like, hey, I did that. So it's a matter of just bringing people along a continuum but bringing them from where they are in a way that kind of makes them want to engage and understand why this is important and feel that connection to why this is important for me and how it can help, you know, enrich my life, like when people understand that being able to talk to and relate to people that aren't like you reflects that inner good in you. Everybody wants to be a good person. I truly believe that people want to be good, they want to be kind, they want to be caring, and when they can understand that developing culture of humility, dealing with racism within yourself, is part of just being a kind, good person, when they can connect that piece, that's when they're willing to engage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really great. Yeah, Helping them find their why, especially if they're in a situation where they're being told you must go to this. You know, fill in the blank, training right, whether that be, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and where they feel like they're being attacked, like you're a bad person. But I think when you tell people you're a good person and let's work on becoming better, people want to become better people.
Speaker 1:But they want to start from a position of already thinking that they're a good person Gotcha, and then they have to kind of accepting people you know where they are and then hopefully we're all growing. Hopefully we're all growing, just like we said about all those characteristics. Right, we're not saying that we're perfect. In all these places we all have room. We all have room for growth. We all yes, oh Lord, I know I do we all put our foot in our mouth, we all say things that we regret, we all have, you know, biases and prejudices that we may or may not be, you know, aware of, and we are becoming better.
Speaker 2:We are and when I've learned over time that when someone tells me something like do you know that that phrase you just used is really racist, instead of getting defensive it's like sitting thinking go, oh oh no, can you, you know, tell me a little more about that, learn why that's racist, and then just move on. Admit it. When somebody calls you out for these things, think about it, use it as a lesson, say you're sorry and move on. Don't get defensive, because we all say things. It's so much easier to just let it become a growth moment than to try and even defend it, and the times when people have pointed out you know things to me.
Speaker 1:I mean, of course, I think the first thing you feel is like shame, right, oh, my God, right, oh, always, yeah. And so you know, read Bernay Brown, we got all deal with that. But those are some of the times when that has helped me grow the most, because somebody pointed out to me yeah, anyway, so the other thing I wanted to touch on, because we talk about it in the book, is trauma informed approaches. I think we see that more and more. We've got a couple of colleagues who work in this space. I know you've been doing a lot of study on it.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting to me because some of the workshops that I have taken, maybe at conferences and things like that, on trauma informed approaches, even when they say they're for the community, they're kind of not, they're still kind of individual approaches. So they start talking about ACEs you know adverse childhood experiences but we're still not thinking about, like, the trauma of like communities. Think about, you know, all the environmental change that's gone, the flooding that just happened in Vermont or the fires in Canada raging right now, whatever the environmental crisis is, or if it's a history because one of the things we talk about in the book is an understanding community context, right, so if there's a history, like there is in my state and your state, of people black and brown people being driven out in communities, that's a history, that's state, that's a trauma, you know, on whole communities. Yeah, so I don't know how is that? How is trauma informed approaches affecting kind of your work, the work that you do now?
Speaker 2:Well, number one is it really makes me think about being more sensitive, thinking through, because I work in some sensitive areas, especially I work a lot with infant mortality, and it reminds me that sometimes, when we're dealing with like data in this area, to stop and take a moment to reflect that these were lives, because you don't know who's had a loss in your audience. So sometimes doing little things like acknowledging that this is not an easy topic, that there that it can be painful for anybody to talk about, but by taking a moment to say a time out when I'm doing with data, it's like let's take a moment to remember that these were lives. This isn't just data. For many of you, these were lives. So let's take a moment of silence to reflect or pray or whatever.
Speaker 2:Will you know, you feel you need to do about these real lives that are included in these data, and I think giving people that chance to sort of center themselves, deal with their emotions, maybe pray praying is important for a lot of people to be able to calm their traumas and also ensuring that people know that it's okay to walk out if you need to, to take a break to. If you need to walk out, just do it. You know, don't ask permission, just do it. Yeah, yeah I, and if you need to take a break or something.
Speaker 1:I love that in terms of working with communities to understand it. We do you and I do a lot of things like data reviews and data walks and those kinds of things, so kind of setting that stage in the beginning, giving people permission to take a break if they need. Even when we're doing and I'm speaking to our evaluator listeners here if you're doing focus groups and interviews, saying some of this upfront and asking people periodically do you need to take a break? Are we okay to continue so that people feel they can, you know, take care of themselves?
Speaker 1:Right, but yeah but I think really understanding that, that community context and that history is really so important.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, even understanding. Say, you may be doing focus groups with a bunch of moms and you think, oh, this is easy, we can talk about parenting. You never know who in that group might have had their kids taken away by CPS at one point. You know and you ask something about what your, you know thoughts about being a parent and there may be stuff associated with that. So even in the most innocent, seemingly innocent, of situations, there may be trauma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. One of the things that you and I talk a lot about, not only together but when we're teaching or working with our clients, is the need to be inclusive of their communities, the communities they're working with. I think we could both. I kind of alluded to my stories. You know you substance abuse prevention coalitions that that meet at nine o'clock in the morning or in the middle of the day they're all at school folks, right? So what are you doing to reach out to youth? You do a lot of maternal and child health work, so I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit about the need for being inclusive and how community coalitions, collaboratives, organizations, whatever it is be more inclusive of their communities.
Speaker 2:Like you say, sometimes it's a matter of thinking about meeting times, meeting spaces. One of the coalitions I work with used to meet in a part of town that wasn't easily accessible to the population that they're actually the focal population. So now they're holding their meetings at a library in the neighborhood, which is an accessible space. That's in the neighborhood and it aren't making the people most represented drive far. It's the people who aren't so represented that do the driving, which is good. That's fine. They're getting paid to. They're still meeting during the day, but it's around lunchtime and it's getting better. And this year they've always hosted this summit where they present speakers, and it's always aimed at a professional audience. So this year their summits will run fried professionals, with all the doctors and you know that speaking, and then one the next day that's going to be geared toward the community with topics and be related to. So seeing that risk to taking this more to community access, community has been a big improvement.
Speaker 1:So, thinking about time, thinking about location, what, what can? We were talking about doing data reviews and data walks and helping people understand their local data. How can data help people understand how inclusive they are being or not being?
Speaker 2:I think that helping people connect to data. I think that it's important that people know that you cannot take data to a community and just show it in a series of slides. That doesn't work. Doing things like data parties, data walks places where they have a chance to absorb each little piece of data, one at a time, with someone who guides them through that process, explains what they're looking at. Not everybody is really great at looking at a graph and immediately grasping it. So helping people process the data, helping them, asking them questions that help guide them into what kind of things might I want to think about and then what kind of answers? Questions like what stands out to you, what's different than your expectations, what, what looks like, what you? How does these findings make you feel? What do you think these findings say we need to be doing? Things like that can help communities not only see the data and learn about the data, but think about how they can use it to take action.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think part of helping them look at the data, rather, is when they're looking at who participates. Asking that question, that hard question Are we really reaching the people that we most need to reach, or that we intend to reach, or who really need our services?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Who needs to know this? Oh, yeah, well, yeah, that's another question. So, yeah, and that, yeah, that's important. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, and I didn't know if you had any examples of how kind of maybe being. I know you've done some data walks and data parties lately. I know you spend a lot of time looking at your local maternal and child health data. When you have access to it, I should say, yeah, it took us three years to get the data. Yeah, so I didn't know if you had any stories you wanted to share there or not.
Speaker 2:I think my favorite was that we had the data party. We shared results from perinatal periods of risk analyses that were completed by Dr Kair Brown, your first guest, who I'm working with on this. And I think my favorite story is the excitement people had because, instead of having people in the room talk because you know, when you ask people the questions and have them talk, it's always the people who talk the most so to get the to elicit input from the quiet ones and the people who maybe felt shy, we had them write down their responses on my favorite new toy, the electrostatic sticky notes. And then we had big post-it sheets on the wall with the questions and then they went up and put everybody everybody in that room put their answers up. So everybody's voice got into the conversation that way, and I think that was that was.
Speaker 2:And after the session was done, they said they really liked the way I did that. They said that felt really good, everybody did, they enjoyed it. They felt like they were included. They felt like they, they got to speak even though it was writing things. It was their voices. And then when they get back, when I put it all together into a document and it gets emailed to them. You know they feel like my voice is out there now.
Speaker 1:Yes, so yeah, and I think that's one of the things that we really enjoy doing with communities is anything experiential to get them engaged, to get their hands on the information or the data, or designing whatever strategy they're trying to implement, anything we can do to get them up moving, talking and, like you said, there's lots of ways to talk, because some people do dominate, you know, the conversation. A lot of the professionals will dominate conversations and if they're community members, they tend to defer and be quiet. So, yeah, we love using those strategies. So we're coming almost a time and you know, I meant to go back and see how you answered my second favorite question, which is what community possibilities do you see? I think that would be really fun. I'm going to have to go back and listen to the end of your first interview, since it was a while ago now, just to compare it to how you're about to answer it. So, what community possibilities do you see?
Speaker 2:Well, I think in this world, I think people in this world are getting tired of the divisions. We've been divided, divided, divided 80 different ways. It's like they slice and dice society and keep pulling us apart. And I think my possibilities I'm seeing as people seem to be more excited about the thought of coming together and I think that potential for societal unity is there and that's the possibility I like to focus on is how to bring people together, how to create unity across our society so that we understand how to work together and make the world better for everybody.
Speaker 1:Well, as usual, we are on the same page, because that is very similar to my answer. So, yeah, I see a future where people stop screaming each other and try to figure out what do we most want, because most people want their families to be happy and healthy and safe. So can we come to an agreement there? Now, maybe our strategies don't look the same, maybe our politics don't look the same, but we all want that. We all want our families to be happy and healthy and safe.
Speaker 2:I think we need to stop letting politicians and others define what that means. Come together as a community and decide among ourselves what that means, because I think it would come a lot closer than what we're being fed by politics and media and everything else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think for a lot of us, there's the possibility of starting small, getting to know your neighbors. What are some community nonprofits or organizations that you can engage with and give your time and your money to? Getting involved in your local church, whatever that is. Taking a look at your friend group Does that really represent who you say you are? I've been thinking a lot about that lately. So yeah, so yeah, start small, think positive, keep going. So hey, susan, I really appreciate you coming on the show again and talking about our work in communities and talking about the book Yep and coming up, we're gonna be doing some coalition webinars. So yeah, stay tuned folks.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming.
Speaker 1:Hi everybody, thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of Community Possibilities. Before I let you go, I want to point you in the direction of some resources that might help you out. We have designed them just for nonprofits and community-based organizations like coalitions. So if you go to the website communityevaluationsolutionscom slash resources, you're going to find a brand new logic model template, a theory of change template, a coalition assessment and a mini course designed to help you share your data, to tell your story. So there's lots more there. I hope you check it out. I hope it's helpful. One thing you could do to help me out, if you would be so kind, is to leave a review and maybe share an episode. Those likes, those shares, those written reviews really help us get in more ears. And oh my gosh, I totally forgot to remind you that my book with Susan Wolf is out. It's called A Guidebook to Community Consulting, A Collaborative Approach. So lots of resources, lots of things going on here at Community Evaluation Solutions. Hope you have a good week, everybody. We'll see you next time.