How long should it take to train 24 people to conduct ABCD interviews? We want to have them learn about the institution sponsoring the drive, learn enough about ABCD as the approach, and practice a few interviews, too. But we also want to do all this in say 4 sessions of 1.5 hours each. How reasonable is this plan?

Hi Magdalena,

It's a little hard to say without knowing more about /being there at your institution, but off the top of my head I'd say you'll need more time if you really want results. Because this is such a huge paradigm shift and is best learned in actual practice, it's best to have a long-term plan of how you will support these interviewers.

Personally, I don't think it's possible to do a good training in under one full day--and two is better, possibly spaced apart so people have time to process it. Otherwise folks get inspired for one day and then go back to daily life and fall back into the same patterns of deficiency, needs-based or top-down thinking... or, even if they totally get it, they can get easily overrun by whatever forces in their context come from a needs or top-down mentality.

That's where sustained support/conversation is so crucial... once you do a full training (1-3 days), I'd recommend a once-a-week or every-two-weeks get-together for the first couple months (possibly longer) to provide a space for refreshing on the concepts, sharing stories--victories as well as challenges--and building a strong community of support among the interviewers themselves.

I'd strongly encourage that part of the learning experience happen out in the community--one of my favorite ABCD teachers, De'Amon Harges, always takes people out into areas of town that folks are MOST likely to say is full of needs, not assets, and have people walk around in small groups and look for what gifts, talents and assets are there that they could use. Then he gets everyone back together in a large group to discuss what they saw and he will help them see how the concepts play out in real life scenarios. This is crucial because however much folks tend to fall in love with these ideas, they tend to get hung up around actually going out and practicing them... then they get discouraged and give the whole thing up, or avoid the scariest part (actually going out and having conversations) with other stuff that might look like ABCD but is more just busywork.

It's also a good idea for someone to stay in contact with what's happening nationally/internationally such as webinars they can call into, or workshops or conferences, so they can connect with the broader movement and get energy/inspiration/support from that level. (Toronto Summer Institute is coming up and is fabulous! www.inclusion.com/inclusionnetwork.html )

I'm definitely interested in what others think too..!

This is based on my own experience and that of my colleagues.

I'm also interested to hear more about your organization and project.

Cheers!

~ April

Thanks for throwing back the ball, April. We have a difficult job ahead, being that we are 1200-1700 people spread out over several countries, mostly in US and Europe at the moment. We have formal institutions (four): one for governance, another to handle properties held in trust, one for outreach, and the fourth which is charged with community development and conceived to be the biggest of the four institutions eventually, because of its scope. But strictly speaking at this moment in time, we're largely a community of practice or a community of interest, and only those of us living in concentrations of practitioners constitute communities of place. The largest concentration is about 300 people, and the smallest is 6.

Four 1.5-hr sessions is barely a day's training, as you've pointed out. So far, everyone involved in spearheading the ABCD project - 8 people - has been working on it as a volunteer for the past year or so. We now have a workplan, a theme/context (establishing our service guilds), a potential set of initial interviewers, a set of open-ended questions to get the conversations started, and the announcement and invitation to everyone about the project (which itself took months to work through).

I don' t see us attracting outside money to support our training and implementation efforts - money could help increase the time spent on training, ma-a-ybe. In any case, as a community of practice looking to develop a positive can-do orientation within the group, this task would not becurrentlyeligible for public grants. I know we need to not take shortcuts with the process, and I am keeping my focus on the opportunities ahead.

The manager for the project was going to have one follow-up during the first couple of months, but I shared this with her, and now she has agreed that we should do more. Thank you for pointing out that doing this would help to build a sense of communal support among the interviewers themselves. I keep trying to convince my colleagues to take their own ABCD training so that I don't have to be the "expert" that they argue with! I'll definitely mention the Toronto Summer Institute .

And I have been lobbying my institutional supporters to be more clear on their end about support, long-term as well as in the field so that this is felt as ongoing community-building and not sitting around waiting for things to happen and the community running out to them.

Thank you very much for pointing to De'Amon's recommendation to have some of the learning happen out in the community. I'm going to find a way to do this even with a community of practice , and will let you all know how that actually works out.

Peace,

Magdalena

Sorry to take so long to respond, Magdalena, I could have sworn I did respond, but it must have just been in my head :p

Wow... you DO have a large net you're working with. Which is great and of course uniquely challenging--the nice thing, it would seem, is that the breakthroughs and insights you gain as you experiment can flow more easily within your big web of people than if you were a very small group.

I'm really happy to hear that your manager is open to looking at longer-term support ideas. As much as you can find leaders and hosts within whatever group of people you're working with, do it -- so you can take the pressure and responsibility off of you and, more importantly, invite people to give their gifts. And actually I did want to add that too -- whatever initial group you have already that's very committed to this, as much as possible try to develop deep, real relationships with each other and a space of mutual support, exploration and experimentation around the practice of ABCD... finding out each others' gifts--those that are easy to name, and those deeper 'core gifts' that you learn through observation--then trying all kinds of ways to find a place for those gifts to be given in your work, in your web of relationships, etc.

I'd love to hear any updates! Wishing you lots of fun and breakthroughs

-April

We're getting closer to training! I'm told that the Executive Director is aiming for November 15 to start 3 days (or 24 hours) of training. They -- the executive director and staff -- wanted a database and learning conversations, but what they outlined to me was a plain old interview. I've been working hard for the past year or more to make sure they understood the approach I was proposing. So now, I have submitted my presentation and speaker's notes to our culture's institution for review and am waiting to hear back. "Crossed fingers".

I just read Ron's story about the Lutheran Church in California. Very encouraging. I tend to keep things close to the chest until I have commitments, so I'll post when I hear and then let you know what we ended up with and how the training is going.

I think the ongoing support and development is cricial. We engaged mentors from other well established schemes to give regular support to our small band of interviewers and they seemed to really work.

As for Magdelana's comments on the training she is/has developed: -

"We now have a workplan, a theme/context (establishing our service guilds), a potential set of initial interviewers, a set of open-ended questions to get the conversations started, and the announcement and invitation to everyone about the project (which itself took months to work through).

I don' t see us attracting outside money to support our training and implementation efforts."

I see the Workplan, presentation, set of open-ended questions etc. all as resources that I am sure others could benefit from. It might be difficult to attract outside money for your training efforts but, someone like me (a training officer in a small local authority in the Southof England at the start of our journey)may well be willing to purchase such well developed resources to re-use? As a community of practice I am all for sharing freely, am always grateful for it and willing to do the same. However, I can see that some sort of recognition of the time and effort it went into producing them can also be valid too.

Shame you can't get them on ebay:-))

We received word over this past weekend that we can go ahead!

I'm dealing with a cat emergency so also, and I have only the next few days to:

• break the training into days (I have it in topic sections only at the moment);
• familiarize three institution folks on their specific training roles (one can't attend the whole thing);
• collect the references into one clean document for sharing;
• and tweak the exercises to accommodate the number of people showing up each day.

Pacific/Hawaii folks will start first, then the next day we work with the Mainland US/Canada/Europe folks. We couldn't do a three-day training in three back-to-back days since we are working across time zones, and my institution folks were assuming no one would do anything less than one day a month or half a day each month for 6 months. Instead, I presented options to the group of interviewers and, to make a long story short, they argued for 3 back to back weekends at the very least. So the institution folks went along with my initial recommendation .

Quick reply for now as I take a break so you can get started. You should look at the work of people who have already accomplished something with their work to see what materials you might find useful. The forum moderators have oodles of experience and I have no idea yet whether my own will result in anything with my fellow volunteers.

I searched around and saw several sites online that have materials you can re-purpose. I borrowed from a housing authority in Singapore, but when I just tried to go there again, the site has been locked so that only "authorized users" can get in.

Good sites are listed in the resources section of this forum, and I just found another one:http://ctb.ku.edu/Really well-organized.

Have you ever undergone an ABCD training yourself? What have you tried to start, or what dreams are you hoping to fulfill where you are?

Thanks to your advice, April Doner, and using Sococo, a web-based virtual office, I was able to conduct a three-day ABCD training over three weekends for about 30 people in Europe and the Americas. It's hard to believe people would sit still at their computer for an entire day. We worked out the schedule ahead of time and included short and long breaks, inspirational breaks, and different kinds of learning activities whereby to bond with one another and also keep energy high throughout.(I had to be online before 6am, but the furthest out group was giving up an afternoon and an evening to end at 11pm local time.) Since December when we finished, the interviewers have been practicing with friends and family, and the start-up institution we're working with has been developing what it needs to provide greater support and launch. So everyone is in learning mode and enthusiasm is still high.

Magdalena,

That's very exciting!! Congratulations!!

Do you have pictures from the event? It would be really neat to see a little write-up about the event, perhaps they'd feature it on www.theabundantcommunity.com under "What's working?" and it would be a great blog post on here others could learn from. (I'm imagining you probably had to write something up for work)

I'm curious, what changes have you been seeing so far in both your work/life from experimenting with this -- what has shifted for you? -- and, what are you hearing back from others?

I and I bet others would also be curious to know how you are keeping track of "outcomes" -- always such a sticky subject since this work is so emergent. I and many others struggle with this and it seems to often be a barrier to getting funding.

-A

Yikes, sorry for the late reply, everyone! I am a volunteer, and the only write-up made was for a report at the very top-level that would not have included the kind of detail I share here.

Where to start?

I don't have pictures of the first training event, but we are already working on the training for the next set of interviewers. Apparently, the first set of folks was so enthusiastic that other people started to line up wanting to know if they could just walk in. Not enough managers and trainers to go around and also manage the project and current set of interviewers, so we're scheduling the next training as a proving ground for Training the Trainer. I guess that will be my next major post.

Attached is a picture of a different community meeting I take part in every week using the same technology that I mentioned earlier.

As you can see, we can do breakout rooms in Sococo. The 6 faces you see in the picture are just a few of the 10 people meeting. That's me, with dark hair, second from right.

Of course, for the training, the faces are different, the map showing where everybody is shows different groups of individuals.For the ABCD training, the breakout feature came in very handily when, for example, I asked the trainees to pair off and interview one another for the introductions or divide into sets of four or five people and talk about institutions and associations. Each group could use the Chat function as a flipchart to write down key words from what people had to say, then they would copy the material and when we came back into the main room they could paste into the Main Room's Chat and report out. The virtual arrangement was not as dynamic as having everybody in the same room buzzing away, but it gave trainees a sense of movement and a feeling of security about being heard and getting comfortable with the technology at least. The participants came from Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and North America.

The interviews are going very slowly but steadily as the interviewers are all adults with busy lives. For me, ABCD feeds my appetite for empowering others. And doing it it fits in with the philosophy of the sacredness of the herd that I have learned about over the years. (Reference site: http://sacredcamelgardens.com/)

I identify with being a herd leader -- the animal somewhere in the background staying aware in the moment of the entire herd. I continue to look for leaders and ways to shift responsibility for this projectto others who are capable. For example, now that I've completed the first training, I'm in the process of moving the project managers to learn how to do the training, even as Ialso keep checking in on the trainees and project managers. Even though we are all volunteers, I make sure to keep our roles clear--as the project managers, they handle all the logistics and go through Train the Trainers themselves. As the initial trainer, I trained the first batch of interviewers and consult on the handling of the project.

It's kind of brassy of me, as I haven't been a formal student of ABCD. However, I believe ABCD is critical for us and since I was already doing a different major function elsewhere in the community and I have many other projects elsewhere, because that's just the kind of person I am, we're all pitching in to keep things moving and it's my responsibility to myself to set my boundaries. The work all you ABCD professionals are doing is a blessing to the world.

I will start a different post on the Training the Trainers I'm doing so this doesn't stretch out so much.

As far as outcomes and what more others are saying besides getting new interviewers, this ABCD project is one of two that I have heard be acknowledged by some leaders as something positive that's occurring in the community no matter how small.

Yesterday, my husband and I had a guest visiting from DC who we hadn't seen in a few years and who is also close friends with one of the managers of this ABCD project. Our friend has run several businesses and has been active in community initiatives there.My husband tried to tell him about ABCD as he is also using it but for a project in a different community and for a different purpose. At the end of his explanation, my husband also pointed out to our friend that this was the same work that I was trying to do with the manager we all knew. The man exclaimed, "Oh, now I get what she has been trying to tell me and why she's so excited!" So I challenged him to articulate what he thought he understood. He said, "You're trying to identify our resources." Simple as that, and now I know he will support it.

In terms of outcomes, I used to sit on local citizen committees for the United Way and it was one of the ways I learned about the importance of outcomes. So far we are still trying to get through a certain number of interviews and I have had to remind these managers to share this information with their team as a way to keep folks fired up. I guess the fact that we have more interviewers to train without having campaigned for them is a sign of some community spirit re-emerging.

Thanks for the questions, and I'll keep reporting as I can.