Hi everyone,

This is my first post. How exciting. I head up a team of Community Development workers in Bristol, England. We have a fun day planned tomorrow in an inner city area - bringing together people from the Somali Communities and the more established community members.

We have helped organise the fun day with local people, but are very aware that our function is not just about people having a good time (although that will be a fantastic by-product) - but in using the opportunity to build the community. We'd like to ask some questions to gather info on people's hopes and dreams.... BUT! We don't want to be full-on or formal.

Any ideas of good opening questions where we can gather information - make connections but without being too "local authority".

Thanks all in advance

Heather

updated by @heather-barham: 10/24/16 05:36:11AM

This sounds like great fun, Heather! This is one videothat you may want to take a look at... it has great questions...

Let us know how the event goes...

Hi! This video seemed like a good thing to check out but the link no longer exists... it says the user no longer has an account. Do you have another one? Thanks!

Thanks for letting us know Krista - I'm not sure what happened to the group that posted this on youtube... I will try to track down the video and repost it.

In the meantime, I've written up an explanation of the video on the page that the link goes to... Feel free to check that out.

Oh no! This video seems have disappeared off of Youtube. I'm going to see if I can track down what happened to it.

In the meantime, here are the five questions they suggest asking (paraphrased by me):

• How long have you lived in this community/neighborhood? (I find this gets at more than just saying the amount of time... often opens up the conversation and you find out a lot about the person's connections to their community)
• What do you love about your community? (People in many neighborhoods are seldom asked that, especially those in "troubled" communities. A great positive way to start a conversation)
• If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change in your community? (notice it's not worded as "what's wrong"... also gets at what's important to the person, in a non-threatening way)
• What skills or talents do you have that could help make that change happen? (once they show what's important to them, they may be more willing to share their gifts and talents than if you had started with this question).
• Would you be willing to get together with other people who are interested in making this change happen to talk about what you can do together? (gets beyond just mapping the assets and starts making the connections between people)

Hope this helps! I'm not sure if I will find the original video, but I will repost it if I do.

updated by @abcd-in-action: 10/24/16 06:04:02PM