Facilitating Change
Some people are experts at keeping teeth healthy. We call them dentists. Some are experts at building things. We call them architects. Some are experts in traveling to outer space. We call them astronauts. We are experts in helping communities practice healthy communication. We call ourselves facilitators. And like architects and astronauts, you may not always understand what we do or how we do it, but you know we’re important.
The Civic Canopy provides an array of services that allow our partners to:
Build Relationships
Foster connections among people and across a broad network of partners
Develop Capacity
Create the culture, conditions, and capacity for transformational change
Catalyze Collective Action
Mobilize communities to create the systems they need to thrive
To achieve these results, The Civic Canopy designs and facilitates public processes using a research-based Community Learning Model (CLM) that focuses on results, includes relevant and diverse stakeholders in thoughtful dialogue, and develops action plans and structures for learning from results—all within a culture of trust and collaboration. The CLM is a proven game-changer for achieving positive change in communities and puts high-quality processes at the forefront of solving issues that affect the way society functions.
Services
The Civic Canopy provides a suite of services around the Community Learning Model. We partner with individuals, organizations, and coalitions to provide these services, but we also work on multi-year partnerships with entities that would like to provide these capacity-building supports to their network.
- Coaching and Training
- Group facilitation
- Community engagement
- Coalition building
- Support in using data
- Leadership development
- Strategic planning
- And more.
Because we focus on addressing complex problems throughout diverse communities, our projects often resist fitting into a simple mold. Throughout our work, however, partners report a significant increase in their knowledge of how to:
- Create effective collaboration
- Engage diverse stakeholders
- Foster dialogue
- Take a results-based approach
- Work with data
- Reflect on past practices to improve future work
- Take action on the issue the project addressed
If the Canopy’s short-term goal is to provide as much support as possible, our long-term goal is to work ourselves out of a job. In an ideal world, we’ll have transferred capacity to others and no longer be needed. The Canopy embraces a transfer of capacity approach where our skills become the community’s skills. The Canopy is a coach, trainer, and supporter to ensure partners are the long-term owners of project success. We turn over design and facilitation functions to partners at an appropriate pace throughout the project timeline.
