http://www.wholonomyconsulting.com
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Tucson Coach Trainings Spring 2011
Fundamentals of Effective Coaching Workshop
Participants will learn communication tools and skills they can use to work effectively with others in a way that promotes self-direction. Listening, paraphrasing, and asking powerful questions are fundamental coaching skills which can be applied to communication with individuals and groups. These coaching skills are based on what research shows supports thinking, learning and growth.
Option 1 -- Saturdays March 5, 19 from 12:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Option 2 -- Tuesday April 5, Monday April 11 from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Option 3 -- Saturday May 7 from 9:00 am – 3:00 p.m.
Two Day Advanced Coaching Workshop -- June 2-3, 2011
The Advanced Coaching workshop is open to anyone who has had the Fundamental Coaching Workshop. Topics covered as part of the Fundamental Coaching workshops include: information on how the brain works as it relates to effective coaching, key elements to developing trust and rapport with others, listening set-asides for coaches, and the following coaching response behaviors: pausing, paraphrasing, and asking invitational questions.
Contact Sarah Griffiths at (520) 271-7970 or slmgriffiths@hotmail.com for registration information
http://www.wholonomyconsulting.com
Learning Opportunities -- High Impact Facilitation and Presenting Training
Workshops offered through Professional Development Alliance
Tucson, Arizona
Spring 2011
Facilitating Meeting Using Whole Systems Methods -- June 9, 2011
Topics include the common principles of Whole System Methods, how Whole System Methods align with recent research on how the brain works and strengths-based approaches to change, the benefits of using Whole System Methods, crafting invitational and appreciative questions, and instruction in how to use the following Whole System Methods: Appreciative Inquiry, The World Café and Open Space Technology.
Making Meetings Matter—A workshop on Designing and Facilitating Effective Meetings, Coalitions, and Change Processes -- May 5, 2011
Recent research on how the brain works, how people learn and grow, and the power of internal motivation call for new ways of structuring meetings and change processes. This workshop will teach participants the following: New scientific research that affects the design of meetings and change processes, Highlights of material in Switch: How to Make Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, and Time to Think by Nancy Kline, and the 10 essential ingredients for creating a thinking environment for any meeting.
6 Secrets to Effective and High Impact Presentations -- April 14, 2011
Topics include: Recent neuroscience and brain research that contain the secrets to effective presenting and learning and exploring 6 “Secrets” that you can immediately put to use in your presentation and facilitation. We also provide ample opportunities to reflect on the implications and applications of this knowledge for our work in the social sector, individually and collectively. These secrets will increase the learning, retention, and engagement of any presentation exponentially. They are simple and easy to adopt. Are you ready to increase your impact?
Contact Sarah Griffiths at (520) 271-7970 or slmgriffiths@hotmail.com for registration information
http://www.wholonomyconsulting.com
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Chronicle of Philanthropy Artticle on CFSA System Change Work
January 9, 2011
A Grant Maker Requires Grantees to Collaborate
“No one agency can meet any one person’s needs,” says Sarah Jones, head of a social-service charity.
Nicole Wallace
The Community Foundation for Southern Arizona has made a big change in its grant making in response to the recession. The fund now awards grants only to coalitions of groups that work together to solve important community problems, not individual organizations.
The foundation last year brought 200 local nonprofit groups together to discuss what significant community change would look like and how they could work together to achieve it. Out of that process, the fund received 29 collaborative grant proposals. In September four partnerships received three-year grants of $225,000 each. They focus on women’s and girls’ issues, neighborhood revitalization in South Tucson, services for the elderly, and the dearth of healthy food in Ajo, Ariz.
The bad economy means that grant makers need to do more than just try to make up some of the money that government has had to cut, says Evan Mendelson, a vice president at the Tucson community fund.
“We actually need to change some of the paradigms of service provision,” she says. “And sometimes a crisis is the best time to do that.”
Closing Gaps
One of the problems organizations that provide services to the elderly identified was a lack of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to accommodate baby boomers as more and more of them reach old age, says Ms. Mendelson.
Alone, no single group could take on the challenge, she says, but now that the groups are talking to each other and working together, they are devising a plan to create neighborhood-based services to help older people stay in their homes longer.
Evan Mendelson says “sometimes a crisis is the best time” to re-evaluate how services are provided.
Two more immediate benefits are that the collaborating groups can make sure they aren’t duplicating programs and can work to close gaps in the services they offer, says Ms. Mendelson.
“You can’t even see the gaps when you’re working in your own silos,” she says.
Better Quality Services
Emerge Center Against Domestic Violence, the Sahuaro Girl Scout Council, and the YWCA Tucson started working together as the Partnership for Women and Girls two years ago, even before the community foundation turned its attention to partnerships.
Traditionally when nonprofit groups think about collaboration, they think about organizations that share very similar missions working together, but that can be limiting, says Sarah Jones, Emerge’s chief executive. The Partnership for Women and Girls takes organizations that are related but not exactly the same to create a continuum of services.
The collaboration allows each group to focus on its area of expertise.
Emerge could follow the lead of a lot of domestic-violence shelters and hire an employment specialist to support its clients who need help to enter the job market.
But the organization could never provide the level of services that the YWCA does in its employment training, since that is a big focus of its operations, says Ms. Jones.
“No one agency can meet any one person’s needs¬—and probably shouldn’t,” she says. “When you try to start being everything to everybody, oftentimes you water down the quality of what you’re providing.”
http://www.wholonomyconsulting.com
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Wholonomy Consulting Featured in Axiom News Part 1 and 2
Check out a Two Part article written about Wholonomy Consulting and published in Axiom News. www.axiomnews.ca
Consultant Discovers Strengths-Based Approach Creates Sustainable Change
Wholonomy Consulting says positivity linked to higher level thinking skills
Tuesday January 4, 2011 -- Camille Jensen
Even before Cassandra O'Neill was introduced to strengths-based consulting she knew there had to be a better approach to increasing organizational effectiveness.
The veteran consultant recalls being frustrated by traditional consulting practices that had people focus on problems so big they were beyond their control, and stifled new thinking and ideas.
“It got to the point where I realized there had to be a better way than the common practice,” says O'Neill. “It was the way people said you should do it, or expect it to be done”
In the course of one year, O’Neill was introduced to Appreciative Inquiry (AI), Open Space technology, World Café, and cognitive coaching, which dramatically changed her work.
Founding Wholonomy Consulting around the very same time, the network of consultants blend the above strengths-based approaches to increase their impact on change, evaluation and sustainability in organizations.
Wholonomy Consulting Senior Partner Sarah Griffiths says the approach is based on research that demonstrates focusing on problems stimulates a fight-or-flight response in one’s brain and narrows a person’s creativity.
“Generally people spend a lot of time exploring problems and then they are asked to think outside the box, and this is actually opposite of how our brain works,” says Griffiths.
She says the Tucson, Arizona-based firm made a “purposeful choice” to use only strengths-based approaches that would help connect people to positive emotions which, when activated, generate higher level thinking skills.
“Strengths-based approaches are brain friendly, and they also focus on what people are doing that is making a difference,” she says, adding they ask questions like what is your impact, what impact do you want to make, what is your vision and how are you going to get there.
“They start by looking at success so they are connecting to that positivity and that is scientifically proven as one of the keys to building and broadening your thinking.”
Both Griffiths and O’Neill have seen this first-hand. O’Neill recalls the first time she facilitated a strategic planning process using a strengths-based approach. Instead of people coming up with a unrealistic wish list, or initiatives that required money that was often unattainable, the group focused on the resources they already had that could be mobilized.
“All of the ideas that they came up with they could actually do right then with no extra money, and they got so excited,” says O’Neill.
“I will never forget that because I knew there had to be a better way and I didn’t even know this was it, but this is one way.”
— More to Come
If you have feedback on this article, please contact the newsroom at 800-294-0051, ext. 24, or e-mail camille(at)axiomnews.ca.
Wholonomy Consulting Builds Momentum for Strengths-Based Community Collaboration
Community Foundation for Southern Arizona funds four large-scale change initiatives
Thursday January 6, 2011 -- Camille Jensen
A consulting firm and a foundation have been able to inspire strengths-based collaboration between 40 community organizations to achieve shared goals.
Wholonomy Consulting senior partner Cassandra O'Neill offered to facilitate workshops for the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona after participating in its grants selection committee and feeling a new approach could generate better results.
The foundation took her up on the offer and invited the 20 organizations who had received grants to attend the first workshop.
During the event, organizational leaders were asked to talk about successful collaborations they’ve had in the past and what success would look like if they were to collaborate in the future, including questions about what the community could achieve if a number of organizations were working together.
Wholonomy Consulting senior partner Sarah Griffiths says they used Open Space and World Cafe as change models for the meeting that allowed people to create “big goals” and then develop steps to achieve the vision.
The result is the Southern Arizona foundation funding four collaborative teams, involving 40 community organizations, to implement their systems change designs in the community.
Evan Mendelson, vice-president of donor relations and program services at the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona, says she is very excited about the outcome, which she attributes to using a strengths-based process to convene community organizations around possibility as opposed to problems.
“There is something that sparks a certain level of passion in using this methodology, to identify who do you want to work with and what do you want to work on and what do you think could happen here. And that comes from identifying those assets and those strengths,” says Mendelson.
One collaborative initiated is the Elder Project. Mendelson says Tucson, Arizona has a large retirement community, which is the fastest growing segment of its population.
Involving most of the community organizations serving seniors, some who prior to the event had never met each other, the group realized that while the services they were delivering currently were effective they would not meet the demands or expectations of the baby boomers.
Because baby boomers will be living at home longer, The Elder Project will shift services from the city to people’s neighbourhoods and consolidate the services delivered by many organizations into one easy access point for seniors.
According to Mendelson, the process was able to move people from a very narrow agenda to thinking about important issues at the community level.
“That was the most exciting point because that’s when I saw how a process, this kind of strengths-based process, could just take people in their normal way of working and move them to a whole other level of working,” she says.
“If we can change the paradigm of how senior services are working, that’s major.”
Wholonomy Consulting has volunteered its services for one full year and, with the foundation, is offering workshops to teach capacity building and how to create sustainable collaboration.
Mendelson says the foundation has no expectations of returning back to its former grant process.
“We are not going to back to doing things the old way. Instead, we think this will generate a whole new way for funders to be able to fund these types of community-wide initiatives.”
Related Story:
Consultant Discovers Strengths-Based Approach Creates Sustainable Change
If you have feedback on this article, please contact the newsroom at 800-294-0051, ext. 24, or e-mail camille(at)axiomnews.ca.
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