Learn with us. TYTHE partners with several local institutions to teach classes open to the public. Not only do our classes serve as great professional development opportunities, but they give you the chance to meet like-minded individuals seeking to create community impact.
Throughout our 14 years, TYTHEdesign has facilitated trainings, workshops and courses for the public as well as our clients. Courses are interactive and include a combination of lecture, case studies, activities, discussion, and reflection. They are a great professional development opportunity that allows you to connect with like-minded individuals seeking to create community impact.
Our course can be adapted for your team’s unique needs, be customized to the duration that best suits your team from 2-hours to a half-day (4-hrs) or full-day (7-hrs) and range from introductory to advanced, as we all approach content all levels of expertise.
ENGAGEMENT Trainings
Leading Through Facilitation
Boost your skills in facilitating roundtables, workshops, and discussions while building your confidence. This training bridges the gap between theory and practice through facilitation. Expect to receive best practices in facilitation to support the discovery of your own style. We use a participatory model to demonstrate 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. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced facilitators.
Stakeholder and Community Engagement
Go beyond traditional paper or online surveys by learning how to conduct meaningful and intentional dialogue with your community. This training will provide you with multiple approaches and techniques to support planning and leading community engagement with stakeholders. Develop strategies for setting achievable and timely objectives and goals, determining what best practices to evaluate, and how to best manage expectations. We’ll model connection, knowledge-sharing, and empathy through activities that promote active participation and collaboration. You’ll walk away with a menu of activities and best practices you’ll be able to bring back to your constituents right away. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced engagement leaders.
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 effective options that work for everyone, often called consensus. This training will help you build a toolkit of techniques and approaches for facilitating productive brainstorms, planning and decision-making meetings, or strengthening voice and choice among young people. In this training, 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. This workshop is available for organizations, city agencies or youth service providers.
STRATEGY Trainings
Design Thinking Fundamentals
Design Thinking (or Human-Centered Design) is a creative, user-centered problem-solving approach that leads to codesigned 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. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced practitioners.
Community Need Assessments
Community need assessments are rooted in human-centered research that supports intentionality in community engagement. In this training, we’ll discuss human-centered and qualitative research methods to adapt for 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. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced practitioners.
Community-Based Planning and Strategy
Gain the confidence to lead your community plans through collaboration with a strategy that supports your goals. This training provides a process for 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 a project or initiative they are working toward building or implementing for troubleshooting and strategic advice. We’ll workshop and troubleshoot them through interactive activities you can adopt for your toolkit. Activities may include building a strategic action plan, conducting community asset mapping, and journey mapping. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced practitioners and to otherwise meet you and your team where you are in the planning process.
Arts and Culture for Community Building
A great strategy for cultivating community spaces that promote inclusion, comfort, and trust, while building empathy is to infuse your engagement with an arts and culture practice. In this training, you’ll workshop a series of activities that promote community connection, strengthen collaboration, and bridge consensus when it comes to analyzing community-based issues. Activities may include community tree building, Forum Theatre, or story circles. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced practitioners.
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.
YOUTH AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT Trainings
Integrating Civic Engagement into Afterschool Programming
This training session is intended for leadership at youth-facing CBOs. We will introduce the principles of civic mindedness and walk through the various ways these concepts can be built into youth programming across disciplines. Participants will walk away with curriculum strategies and civic engagement activities to support the social-emotional development of young people. This workshop can be modified for beginning or advanced practitioners.
Strengthening Youth Voice & Choice
Build a foundation for civic literacy skills and how to hook young people into becoming active, informed
citizens. This training will review the principles of participatory decision-making, a collaborative process that gives power, voice, and ownership to participants, through the lens of the voting process. Explore techniques for building empathy, activating respect, and developing listening skills through hands-on, practical exercises. Training attendees will leave with an understanding of the variety of ways one can build civic literacy skills and attitudes into their programming and best practices for creating opportunities to engage students in choice-making within their organizations.
Building Civic Engagement Through Project-Based Learning
Utilize project-based learning to connect the young people you serve to their history, communities, and the world. Develop and explore student-centered projects to incorporate civic engagement into your programs. This training will be guided through TYTHE’s Civic Engagement Planning Workbook to design a project-based learning experience that connects young people to community histories, social movements, physical environment, and global events that matter to them. This training will also provide strategies for meaningful reflections and discussions following civic action.
Arts and Culture as a Tool for Youth Civic Engagement.
This training will focus on designing and/or repositioning arts and culture programming as an intentional access point for youth civic engagement. The training will review and practice a variety of arts and culture-based activities and pedagogies that center civic dialogue, action, and the social-emotional skills. We will explore storytelling, Theatre of the Oppressed pedagogies, and other ways of harnessing visual arts to amplify students’ voices and connections to their communities.