Pattern Mapping Facilitation & Leadership Skills

Facilitation and Leadership Skills

Facilitation and leadership skills are necessary to effectively lead any group of individuals, including community members interested in creating a community vision. This week, you explore a variety of resources to inform your facilitation and leadership skills. Although there are a range of approaches to developing a community vision, the absolute necessity of bringing community members together cannot be underestimated. This can only be done with a skilled facilitator who understands how to make people feel safe, respected, understood, and heard. The facilitator must also find a personal style and understand his or her own areas of strength and limitations to be most effective. Finally, understanding the community culture and how specific facilitation and leadership skills may be required in certain circumstances is the fine tuning that a facilitator develops with time and experience.

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With these thoughts in mind:

Post a brief description of at least two facilitation and/or leadership skills you think are important for creating a community vision with members of your community and explain why. Then, describe one facilitation or leadership skill in which you excel and explain how. Finally, explain at least one facilitation or leadership skill that you think you need to further develop and explain how you would develop it. Be specific.

(2 pages)

Question 2

Application: Pattern Mapping and Community Visions

A community vision consists of the collective opinions and ideas of a community. Together these opinions and ideas create the overall objectives and goals of a community. They are then used to determine the objective and goals used to develop a community sustainability plan. Pattern mapping is a tool often used to make a community vision explicit. Pattern mapping involves placing the ideas and thoughts of community stakeholders in a mind map. These ideas are then connected to each other in the mind map to show how one idea or thought can affect another. By putting ideas and thoughts on paper or by using mapping software tools, stakeholders can visualize problems and solutions much faster and easier.

Meet at least two friends, family members, or neighbors (e.g., stakeholders) who live in your community, and use pattern mapping to create a vision for your community.

(1–2 pages):

Explain how you used the pattern-mapping process to create a community vision.

State the vision that resulted from the pattern-mapping process.

Be sure to support your postings and responses with specific references to the Learning Resources.

READINGS

King, C., & Cruickshank, M. (2012). Building capacity to engage: Community engagement or government engagement? Community Development Journal, 47(1), 5-28.
Retrieved from the Walden Library databases
Madison Connecticut. Planning & Zoning Department. (2014). Community Development. Retrieved from http://www.madisonct.org/PZ/docs/POCD/4%20-%20Adopted%20POCD.pdf
Work Group for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas. (2009). The Community Tool Box: Developing facilitation skills. Retrieved from
http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/leadership/group-facilitation/facilitation-skills/main
Work Group for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas. (2009). The Community Tool Box: Proclaiming your dream: Developing vision and mission statements. Retrieved from
http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning/vision-mission-statements/main

MEDIA

Laureate Education. (Producer). (2010). Creating a community vision. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Note: The approximate length of this media piece is 12 minutes.

Optional Resources

Jacobson, R. (2009). Sustainable communities: Cultivate seven essential paradoxes. Leadership Excellence, 26(5), 17.
Retrieved from the Walden Library databases.
Sustainability Now. (2013). Vision of Sustainability Now! Retrieved from http://www.sustainability-now.org/vision.htm
The World Bank. (2014). Sustainable Development. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/sustainabledevelopment