Connecting Service and Politics

Exploration (First-Year) Training, Enrichment & Reflection

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Group Reflection:

"The New Commons" - excerpt from Common Fire (pp. 1-4)

• Emphasizing the importance of developing a keen understanding of their rapidly changing community, who is in it, what its needs are, and how our desires, loves, goals, and hopes fit into it.
  • "...they are being thrust into a larger sphere of responsibility, one calling for a keener recognition of the diversity, complexity, and ambiguity that have become the warp and woof of the common life we all share. More, they sense that a capacity for connection, for reflective, creative, strategic response to suffering lies at the core of what it means to be human. They are recognizing that the reality of the global commons challenges us to broaden and strengthen our understanding of citizenship," (p. 3-4).
  •  Common Fire _New Commons_.doc

 

These carefully constructed trainings have linked Connecting and Service and Politics with the four year Developmental Model. Each sequence for each year has a goal that will outline what the necessary steps are in coinciding your Bonner program with this intitave.

 

First Year Goal:  For students to begin understanding the community in which they will be working. Further, for students to enhance their knowledge of the problems that underlie the needs of the community and have them give their time and efforts in assisting and addressing  them.

 

First Set of Activities

Community Asset Mapping 

Overview: In this stage, you’ll be introduced to the concept of community asset mapping. This helpful tool will allow you to utilize all of the unique and beneficial assets in your community from community partners to government agencies. From the warm up to the activity’s end, you will learn how to locate, communicate and make partnerships with all of the valuable members of your community and campus. Along with this activity, it should be emphasized that participants are encouraged to map out elected officials, community board members and government workers to go along with the Connecting Service and Politics module.

 

 Activity 1  Human Knot (Suggested Time:15 Minutes)

This exercise will teach the participants the value of all members in a community. Through its unique implementation of creating a “web”, this activity shows those participating how each member of a community must work together in order to create and maintain sustainability.

 

 Activity 2 Principle IOUS Presentation and Discussion (Suggested Time: 30 Minutes)

This lead-in discussion will help the group focus on identifying deficiencies and solutions to community problems through the IOUS approach. The overall goal of the discussion is to get participants to understand that by focusing on deficiencies of agencies and the community, things will not be accomplished. This activity will lead into the idea of mapping out community assets and being able to use them for creating solutions. To go along with the CSAP model, emphasize the need for understanding policies that effect the community and the people in office and agencies that can guide you to changing those policies or making new ones

                          

Activity 3 Review Resources to Collect (Suggested Time: One Day)

In this activity, participants will begin to collect their resources for their community mapping. Remember, participants should focus on elected officials, government agencies and other sources of the like along with community partners, parishioners, etc;

 

 Activity 4 Community Mapping and Profile Banking (Suggested Time: One-Two Days)

In this activity, participants will go out in the community and begin canvassing to collect data on all of the community assets they can find. The previous activity should have had them come up with the resources necessary for locating these assets. Now, they will physically go out and collect data and talk to these individual agencies, groups and people. Remember, emphasize the importance of canvassing elected officials, governmental agencies and researching policy.

 

 Activity 5 Campus Profiling (Suggested Time: One-Two Days)

Here, participants will gather information about their campus, as it is a unique asset to the community. Make sure that they make note of any political organizations on campus, voter registration drives and initiatves and activist/community service groups the exist.

 

 Activity 6 Creating an Individual Asset Bank (Suggested Time: Half-One Day)

Now, set up for the rest of the day:  another community immersion, this time focused on developing contacts and a better sense of how individuals in the community are its assets.  Participants may have encountered and interacted with community residents and members during the first canvassing, but now the focus is on that intentionally. 

 

An Individual Asset Bank is a compilation of information about individuals (of diverse means and backgrounds) who are potential assets to a project.  Spend several hours (or days) just going out, introducing yourself to a diverse array of individuals you find in the community, and briefly collecting the beginnings of an Individual Asset Bank.

 

 

Group Reflection: 

"Transforming the Meaning of 'Home'" in Common Fire (pp. 31-2) & Intro to "Who Are My Partners?" in Common Fire (p. 51).

• This passage discusses the development of trust and agency through the creation and extension of one's 'home'. Civic engagement begins with a sense of family usually rooted, in the beginning, to a particular place, group of people, or community. The previous activity focused on forging a lasting relationship between you and a new community, giving you an initial framework for understanding its deepest needs and strongest allies. This place-based trust and agency can serve as a catalyst for committed civic engagement and a springboard for a broadening of the sense of 'home'.
  • "...[W]hen human development happens well, both initially and throughout our lives, we experience home as a familiar center of belonging and identity, surrounded by a permeable membrane which makes it possible to sustain and enlarge our sense of self while admitting elements of the widening world," (p. 32).
  •  Common Fire_Home_.doc

 

Second Set of Activities

Identity Circles

This activity is designed to allow participants to not only reveal to others how they identify themselves, but to understand their own identity. This will allow them to work better with others as everyone will be sharing. Along with the theme of community and community building, self reflection and identity are hugely important to maintaining the sustainability and relationships with community members and within the community itself. As a team building exercise, this activity will allow participants to feel more comfortable with not only their team, but themselves, thus allowing the process of finding solutions to community problems more manageable. It may also be noted that these are great to implement with people on campus, community partners, faculty and people from community government and agencies. Further, to go along with the CSAP model, the identification portion of the exercise will pertain to how  the participants view themselves in the community and as activists for change.

 

Activity 1 Intro and Warmup (Suggested Time: 10-20 Minutes)

Here is an opportunity for you to get the workshop going and begin introducing the exercise. You may want to introduce yourself more fully to set a stage of sharing. For instance, you can share your own name and its origins and a few things about yourself. Set an appropriate tone, using your own style. The tone should be between casual and semi-serious (probably not too lighthearted nor somber and scary).

 

Activity 2Implementation of Identity Circle (Suggested Time: 40-60 Minutes)

This activity consists of participants gathering in circles in learning about one another through individual exploration

 

Third Set of Activities

Bridging the Gap

This set of activities allows participants to understand the differences, but overall similarities between different types of civically engaged people: Activist, Politician, etc; From there, the group will learn how each, in their own way can work to make change together. This leads into participants brainstorming and coming up with ways in which people in the campus community, regardless of what type of citizen they may be labeled as, are a unique asset to community solutions and can work together in addressing these solutions.

Activity 1 Brainstorming (Suggested Time: 30 Minutes)

This activity devles into the different kinds of activists that encompass the civically engaged world. Participants will be able to hear about different types and brainstorm their ideas on them.

 

Activity 2Jimmy and Jen Service (Suggested Time: 30 Minutes)

This activity will have participants writing biographies on made up activists, from the different types discussed above. Their stereotypes and overall perceptions of these kinds of people should play a big role in their writing.

 

Activity 3Bridging the Gap on Campus and in the Community (Suggested Time: 30-40 Minutes)

This activity will allow particiapnts to come up with ways in which they can bring together campus and community members on issues that are important to all types of people.

 

Group Reflection: 

"Discovering Power," in The Quickening of America, Lappé and Du Bois (Jossey-Bass, Inc.: San Francisco), pp. 45ff.

• This chapter in The Quickening of America focuses on uncovering the myth that presents 'power' with a negative connotation. Unlocking the positive aspects of power is essential for developing a strong and successful engagement with civic and political life in the community. Lappé and Du Bois have provide several activities to encourage you to reflect upon and engage the concept of power. The purpose of this reflection is to develop a sense of community and individual efficacy both in civic and political engagement.
  • "If we are convinced we have no power, it's easy to see power as bad. And that means keeping it at arms length," (p. 47).

 

Fourth Set of Activities

Advocacy 101

This activity will prepare participants for actual advocacy that they will again encounter in a their third year training. The most “political” of the four First Stage activities, Advocacy 101 guides students into thinking about and implementing their strategies for articulating their beliefs and solutions to community and broader problems.

 

Activity 1 Intro  (Suggested Time: 10 Minutes)

Introduction to Activity 1

 

Activity 2 Discussion (Suggested Time: 20 Minutes)

Participants will be assigned topics to advocate for and have time to go over how they will articulate them.

 

Activity 3 Presentation (Suggested Time: 40 Minutes)

Here, participants will explain how they came up with their presentation for their assigned matieral.

 

Activity 4 Large Discussion (20 Minutes)

This is the last part of the workshop and will involve participants talking about what worked and what did not in their smaller group discussions as well as better ways to come up with presentations.

 

Group Reflection:

Active Citizenship or Responsibility Reflection

 

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