Our Learning Lab is where we, often in collaboration with our colleagues and other partners, explore how we can connect more deeply with our ‘why’ and amplify our positive sustainable and social impact. It’s where we step outside our comfort zone, unpack our own assumptions and review the status quo (nothing is set in stone!). We take a refreshingly honest look at the reality and challenge whether things can be done differently at a strategic or operational level through reframing or reimagining them, and investigate where this journey might take us. We embrace mistakes and failure too; after all failure is the more fertile seedbed for learning.
It's an invigorating place to be and one filled with possibility and potential. Learnings are fed back into our wider work, as well as being disseminated through our thought leadership. We believe that a learning mindset and an in-built iterative process are invaluable for our growth and sharing takeaways and insights with our community means that our work can benefit all.
We’d like to invite potential clients who identify with this approach to reach out with your Learning Lab challenge and join us on a collaboration like no other!
This page will track our endeavours and our learnings through mini case studies and short thought leadership articles.
“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides.”
- Tony Schwartz
Community Leaders Course
Be The Difference teamed up with Leitrim Volunteer Centre and Lartey Facilitation to do a 10-week in-person course for budding community leaders. Be The Difference led on the design and delivery, leveraging Annie Moon’s community development expertise and participatory toolkit.
The aim of the course is to upskill local people and give them the confidence to come together to identify issues that they wish to address and to then move forward with an action plan to be the difference that they wish to see. Post-course, the core group of participants will have a peer-to-peer network and increased capacity to support one another going forward with community-led initiatives.
The first part of the course is skills-focused and learning about what community leadership looks like and how it can work in context. Community leadership is very different to conventional leadership; it’s about walking with and alongside people, often sharing the leadership function with others. Key topics have included the participants’ exploring how they view themselves as leaders and working with a wider group, including the dynamic between self and others. We’ve also dived into unconscious bias and diversity, celebrating the richness of what everyone brings to the table.
The second part is an action-learning segment, focusing on a live project that they’ve chosen and learning how to action plan, map and identify key resources, partners and gaps etc, along with a roadmap to help them progress. Central to this has been building their understanding of the wider landscape and how to navigate it, such as knowledge of how a grassroots, community approach can interact with a more top-down approach with those that hold the power, influence and resources.
At every stage of the process, participatory techniques have been used, from storytelling and role play to walk in other people’s shoes and gain new perspectives, through to a toolkit of participatory techniques, originally used in the Global South and adapted for use in the Global North.
The participatory toolkit is described as:
“a growing family of approaches, tools, attitudes and behaviours to enable and empower people to present, share, analyse and enhance their knowledge of life and condition and to plan, act, monitor, evaluate, reflect and scale up community action.”
(source)