When I facilitate brave learning spaces where people are learning to do Allyship and Leadership, we always start with Community Agreements. It doesn’t matter if it’s a one-two hour session or a multi-day workshop. On the rare occasions I’ve skipped them for time or just forgot, we always had to backtrack and set them when differences in understanding happened. Let’s be real, if you’re a human who interacts with other humans, miscommunication and misunderstandings are going to happen. We don’t all start with the same background knowledge, experiences, and education on a topic. Community agreements can help you and your team get on the same page.
Read More →Maybe society (especially FaceBook) should come with Community Agreements like our GLSEN presentations and workshops. These are a list of expectations – a semi-formal social contract that we agree to use in the space. When we set agreements like: Lean into Discomfort, Call In instead of Call Out, Oops/Ouch, and Use the Language You Have, we set expectations that IT’S OK to make mistakes because that’s how we learn.