Nine Core Principles of Engagement
By Peter Deitz • Posted on March 28, 2008
Sometimes, blog entries write themeselves. This post is one of those entries.
Yesterday evening, I attended an excellent pop education workshop called "Finding Our Way to Action: Tactics for Mapping Social Change," organized by the Center for Community Organizations (COCo) in Montreal. The workshop itself was incredibly well-conceived and presented. I'll be blogging about it in more detail next week.
For now, I want to share "nine core principles of engagement," distributed in leaflet form at the end of last night's workshop.
Santropol Roulant is one of Montreal's most effective community based organizations. It brings "people and groups together across cultures and generations" through an "innovative meals-on-wheels service and intergenerational programs."
Since 1995, their vibrant community of staffers and volunteers has braved -40 degree weather in winter to deliver meals across the island of Montreal.
In 2003, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation endeavored to find out what qualities make Santropol Roulant tick. The key findings of their 30-page study, entitled The Southern Wall: Organizational Engagement at Santropol Roulant were summed up in the leaflet distributed last night.
I feel strongly that all of the insights published below are equally important online as offline, including the reference to how physical space affects engagement. A welcoming space needs to be reflected online through images, videos, and appropriate graphic design.
For nonprofit tech professionals, I recommend pairing Santropol Roulant's "nine core principles of engagement" with Katya Andresen's Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We're Forgetting) about Online Outreach. The two documents together offer a picture perfect view of how and why organizations should use social media to reach and engage constituents.
Santropol Roulant's Nine Core Principles of Engagement
People as gifts - Each person who comes in contact with Santropol Roulant is seen as a whole person with many dimensions that, when given space to flourish, feed the organization's vibrancy, capacity to innovate, and overall effectiveness.
Relationship-building - Creating the space and skills for healthy interpersonal and group communication are essential and highly productive aspects of our organizational life.
Comfort with change - We embrace change and uncertainty as opportunities to learn and evolve. For a youth-run organization such as Santropol Roulant, staff and volunteer turnover are necessary and positive elements of our organizational rhythm.
Cultivating individual learning and organizational creativity - We value personal growth, curiosity and play as essential to Santropol Roulant's dynamism and productivity.
Collaborative leadership - We strive to be deeply participatory, sharing decision-making and leadership in a way that contributes to everyone's learning and growth while we deliver on our mission.
The importance of space - We pay attention to the state and arrangement of the physical space as it affects the way people relate to the organization and each other.
Gravitational structuring - We invite people to involve themselves in the tasks, projects, conversations, and decisions that they are drawn to based on their own interests and curiosities.
Coherence - We aim to live our deepest values in all our relationships: with clients, staff, board members, volunteers, funders, partners, neighbours, etc.
Community building - We strive to become a living expression of the change we want to see in the world, rather than simply an instrument for that change.
Read the full report, The Southern Wall: Organizational Engagement at Santropol Roulant >>
Santropol Roulant's "nine core principles of engagement" were posted here with permission from a staff member at COCo. Please let me know if further attribution is required.
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Excellent
Thanks so much for sharing this, Peter. Will be sharing this with several NGOs and am looking forward to reading the full study and Andresen's paper.
The suggestion to see "people as gifts" seems especially important and easy to miss. So often when a person approaches a nonprofit with an offer to get involved, the organization looks at the list of unfilled needs and uses the person's availability to fill one of those slots. Taking the time to get to know that person, what else they're doing, what they're passionate about, why they have time/resources available, what their broader goals are, etc. -- and appreciating that person for all of who they are, and not just for how the organization might benefit from a part of it -- opens up incredible opportunities for both the organization and the individual to work together in unexpected and exciting ways.
This touches on the larger subject of the choice we have as organizations and individuals to take more of a "need/problem-based" or "appreciative inquiry-based" approach to fulfilling our organizational and individual purpose. Each of the nine principles above reflect the latter by inviting us to take the entire context within which an organization's mission exists -- rather than just the subset of an identified need or challenge -- as it's gravitational center. That can feel uncomfortable, especially if we're much more used to the linear problem-solving model, but Santropol Roulant is just one example of the impact those choices have on what we're able to accomplish as organizations and as the people who are engaging in this work.
Christine Egger
http://www.goodallaround.com
Re: Excellent
Hi Christine,
Thank you, as always, for your thoughtful comments. From my perspective, the greatest missed opportunity in terms of "seeing people as gifts" is found in the way employees are often treated at nonprofits.
Santropol Roulant's core principles of engagement focus on how to keep volunteers engaged. But the same lessons apply to staff members. I know of way too many "horror stories" in which the creative potential and passion of nonprofit employees is trampled on.
I won't go into details; but let's just say that some of those stories emanate from personal experiences and the private accounts of close friends.
An appreciative inquiry-based organizational structure: I'd love to hear more about that.
All the best, Peter
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