Throughout our 10 years, TYTHEdesign has facilitated trainings and workshops (also known as courses) for both the public to partake in, as well as customized to our clients’ needs. Courses are interactive and include a combination of lectures, case studies, activities, discussions, and reactions. They are a great professional development opportunity by allowing you to connect with like-minded individuals seeking to create community impact.
Our course can be adapted for your team’s unique needs and detailed desires upon assessment, be customized to duration times of 2-hours, a half-day (4-hrs), or a full-day (7-hrs) and range between introductory to advanced, as we all approach content all levels of expertise.
Engagement Courses
Leading Through Facilitation (Introduction to Advanced)
Boost your skills in facilitating roundtables, workshops, and conversations while building your confidence through it all. This course bridges the gap between theory and practice through facilitation expect to receive best practices in facilitation that lead towards the discovery of how you can best facilitate using your own style. We use a participatory model to demonstrate tricks and tips for planning a guided collaborative experience, while developing your leadership skills. You’ll also have an opportunity to identify specific tools and strategies that maximize your impact alongside your various stakeholders on your current initiatives and highlight techniques for successful group dynamics to ease difficult situations.
Stakeholder and Community Engagement (Introduction to Advanced)
Go beyond the traditional paper or online survey and learn how to conduct a meaningful and intentional dialogue with your community. This course will provide you with multiple approaches and techniques that support planning and leading community engagement with stakeholders. By understanding how to set achievable and timely objectives and goals, determining what best practices to evaluate, and how to best manage expectations, you can begin to improve your services and collections, and how the work you do is perceived by the community.
Toolkit of Stakeholder Engagement Activities
When facilitating engaging activities for stakeholders at your engagement, you’ll witness connection, knowledge sharing, and empathy amongst the members in the room. In this course, you’ll gain a collection of activities that have been proven successful across our engagements with communities. Our activities promote active participation and collaboration. Guaranteed, you’ll walk away with a menu of activities you’ll be confident to bring back to your constituents right away.
Tools and Techniques for Participatory Decision-Making
Participatory Decision-Making is a creative process that gives ownership of decisions to an entire group. It works to find elective options that work for everyone, often called consensus. Build a toolkit of techniques and approaches for facilitating productive brainstorms, as well as planning and decision-making meetings. In this course, you’ll gain clarity on the collaborative decision-making process through hands-on activities. Additionally, you’ll examine best practices for setting and managing expectations and constraints, all while supporting productive conversations.
Making your Public Engagement Accessible
Good community experiences are those that strive to promote the most accessible engagement possible to ensure it is inviting for all. This course will explore inclusive public engagement in regard to age, gender, race, spoken language, physical ability, and reading level and competency. Through case studies and best practices, you’ll understand how to best promote accessible engagements meeting different needs, and considerations such as translation, transportation, and childcare.
Strategy Courses
Design Thinking Fundamentals (Introduction to Advanced)
Design Thinking is an experimental, user-centered problem-solving approach that leads to co-designed and need-based solutions to drive enduring impact with community. With a design thinking approach to problem-solving, you’ll bolster your collaboration and increase empathy, while gathering valuable feedback that supports innovation and growth. In this course, we’ll discuss creative problem-solving approaches and strategies adaptable to your workplace. You’ll identify tools that generate ideas, boost community relations, and promote collaborative problem-solving processes.
Human-Centered Design (Introduction to Advanced)
Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a creative approach to problem-solving that is traditionally rooted in the social sector. It ensures that decisions make are beneficial and relevant for the end users, often community stakeholders who are the recipients of a program or initiative. In this course, we’ll emphasize the power of co-creation as the drive for HCD by working through case studies and activities that promote your collaborative problem-solving and bolster your critical listening skills to challenge assumptions and boost empathy within your own projects.
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Community Need Assessments (Introduction to Advanced)
In line with HCD, community need assessments are rooted in human-centered research that supports intentionality in community engagement to support research. In this course, we’ll discuss human-centered and qualitative research methods that are best adaptable to your stakeholders. We’ll share tools that increase your understanding of the opportunities and challenges that your community may face. By sharing practices that support the selection of an accurate research technique for your specific project (and budget), you’ll gain the confidence to make intentional community-based decisions.
Community-Based Planning and Strategy
Gain the confidence to lead with your executed community plans in collaboration with a strategy that supports your goals. This course provides the process towards building an inclusive community-based plan and executing it with an intentional strategy that promotes accuracy, coordination, communication, and empathy. Participants are encouraged to bring in their own projects and initiatives that are working towards building or implementing a plan, for further troubleshooting and strategic advice.
Interactive Activities for Strategic Planning
Strategic planning that invites community stakeholders to the table promotes the inclusion of insights that help to strengthen the ultimate strategic plan implemented. In this course, you’ll workshop and troubleshoot through different interactive activities that you can adopt for your toolkit. Activities may include building a strategic action plan, conducting community asset mapping, and journey mapping. You’ll be able to take these activities back to your constituents to vision for local impact.
Arts and Culture for Community Building
A great strategy for cultivating community spaces that promote inclusion, comfortability, and trust (all while building empathy) is to infuse your engagement with an arts and culture practice. In this course, you’ll workshop through a series of activities that can promote community connection, and hopefully strengthen collaboration and potentially bridge consensus when it comes to analyzing community-based issues. Activities may include community tree building, forum theatre, or story circles for community building.
Capacity Building Courses
Collaborative Team Building
Build the capacity and strength to lead coordination, intent, and consensus. In this course, you’ll review case studies and learn the best practices in collaborative team building to ultimately strengthen your impact on community initiatives. In small group dialogues, you’ll be able to model the participatory process that includes leveraging each team members strengths, fostering connections, communicating clearly and strategically, and setting expectations for innovation.
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Project Management for Community-Based Projects
Successful community-based projects are implemented with the oversight of a committed project manager that is often the key point person for the implementation. This course promotes leadership and coordination with those who are serving as project managers on community initiatives with their direct stakeholders. You’ll walk away with tools and best practices that you can bring back to your team that promote the level of initiating, planning, engagement, executing, and controlling necessary for successful outcomes.
Speaking and Presenting Publicly with Empathy
Craft and present compelling arguments to a public audience. In this course, you’ll learn to deeply understand the typical challenges that organizations and individuals can face when presenting to the public and identify your personal public speaking style and how to leverage your personal strengths. By practicing presentation skills and refining key messages for getting the larger message across your community, you’ll build the empathy that strengthens your intent.