Pollinators Toolkit: Activities
In this part of the guidelines you will find a collection of activities that you can use to develop a participatory event. The activities differ a lot: some are about learning, others help articulate emotions or activate imagination, still others make space for reasoning and analysis.
Such diversity, first, lets participants approach the issue from several angles, exploring its many different sides. This approach arises out of the recognition that people are complex beings for whom meanings, relationships and values are central to life, who take decisions based on more than rational considerations (following also emotions, intuitions, attachments), communicate through means other than words (e.g. body language) and express themselves through means other than arguments (e.g., through arts).
Moreover, this diversity of activities is a way to be welcoming to a wider diversity of people. It helps accommodate different styles of learning, communication and work, whether they come from personal preferences or are based on different cultural and social backgrounds.
Overall, this approach puts a lot of focus on creativity, use of body and hands-on activities, learning through experience and making the whole process meaningful to the participants. This has consequences for how participatory processes are run:
- The how: activities include elements like visualisations, play, performance, storytelling, tinkering, arts, crafts - in most general terms activities that go beyond discussion and instead engage the body, its senses and emotions, providing also ways to communicate meanings that can be lost in words.
- The where: organising activities in places that are meaningful either to the participants or (and) directly relate to the topic under discussion. This might mean, e.g., the housing estate where people live, a farm, an apiary or a public park.
- The what: The approach recognises that emotions, feelings, attachments, relationships play just as great a role when we try to decide on things or debate with others as do rational arguments and facts. Clearly, also in traditional discussions people speak about their values, relationships or feelings. Here, however, intuitions and feelings are not just described and discussed - thanks to the direct interaction with the place, people and the issue, they can be experienced by others and shared.
- The who: as in any participatory approach, also here the importance of including a diversity of voices and giving them equal weight is crucial. However, it is also recognised here that not everyone feels most comfortable in a verbal exchange of arguments. For this reason, the diversity of methods (the how) is instrumental to making the process as inclusive as possible.
When developing your process, try aiming for complementarity between activities. This means for instance finding a balance between creative brainstorming about the issue and then locking-in on concrete solutions. If you focus on the former, participants will have a lot of fun and a sense of discovery, but might be left with a sense of frustration with an unrealised potential. If you focus too much on the latter, then the proposals or ideas will walk along the well-trodden paths. To help you develop well balanced events, the toolbox activities are organised into stages, each one performing a complementary role.
In the first hour or so you will have to present the project and its organisers, introduce the topic, make people feel welcome and at ease, let them get to know each other, set the rules for collaboration and clarify doubts they might have. That's no easy feat! Especially that the participants (at least many of them) will have no specific connection to the topic and very likely might not be familiar with participatory processes, which are still not a very well know part of civic life. More than that, remember that many of your participants might see the topic you will discuss as controversial, and it is not easy to discuss such matters with strangers. For all these reasons, maximum of transparency, honesty and clarity are needed at this stage. Thee activities can also function as a warm-up for later activities, getting participants into creative and group-work mindset.
There are so many things around us that we do not notice, we take for granted, we forget. Sometimes we see things every day, but never take time to reflect on them, as they form the silent background of our lives. Pollinators might very well be among such things that we do not notice. When we do notice them, we often find insects strange, alien, annoying, threatening. On the other hand, a handful of insects like (honey)bees or butterflies are generally perceived as beautiful and more socially acceptable, even if knowledge about them remains superficial. This part of the process is designed to give all the participants time and support for taking note of pollinators and things connected to them that surround us - some we might not know yet, others we know only superficially, others we know very well and need to share that knowledge with others - and hear what they have to say in turn. This is about getting familiar with the topic, learning about it, bringing to light relevant aspects. This certainly includes scientific knowledge about pollinators, but we want to go beyond that to include also the emotions, feelings, meanings, relationships, intuitions - as well as the knowledge citizens hold derived from their daily life. Next to the diversity of pollinators it is important to bring the diversity of experiences associated with them. Only then we can have a truly informed conversation that can address the full complexity of the issue. But noticing is also very much about rupture, rather than simply learning in a linear fashion. The aim is to also put in question our taken for granted assumptions, so we start looking at the world through new eyes and bring new observations to the discussion table.
The aim of sense making activities is to systematize the different aspects of pollinators decline that have come up during the noticing stage, which might initially seem like a random collection of observations, impressions, ideas, experiences. This is also about prioritising information, issues and concerns, understanding which aspects are relevant from among a myriad of interlinked elements. By the end of this stage participants should have a clear idea of what is important for whom in a given place, in a given time, and for what reasons, thus having a clear idea of what specific aspect of the issue they want to work at the next stage. Sense making will involve in a crucial manner moderation as you may very well encounter disagreements over interpretations, priorities, connections made, categorisations and causal connections drawn. This is only natural, as you move from the focus on individual experience to collaboration.
Using the insights from the sense making activities, the participants are invited to work together to address the issue they identified. What will be most crucial is that you work out how to ground this idea in the context, as it emerged during noticing and sense making. By the end of co-creation the participants should have defined as precisely as possible what exactly should be done and by whom, where and when, with what tools, how.
Once the interventions, ideas or recommendations have been developed, it is important to step back and reflect on them once again from a wider perspective, potentially inviting others to take a look.
In participatory processes we are still ourselves, with our feelings, capacities, insecurities, vulnerabilities. For this reason, an important element of every participatory process is attending to the wellbeing of the participants. as the organiser, together with facilitators, will need to pay attention not just to the content of conversations, but also to whether participants feel comfortable, are respected, have energy to continue. This is an important aspect of making the process inclusive, as everyone will likely have different needs. This is not to say that you should force friendliness and interaction. In this section you will find ideas for activities, that can be used throughout the participatory event, that will help you keep an eye on your 'hive' while still being relevant to the topic at hand.
Once you make your selection of the activities, you will need to prepare a choreography - a detailed description of the meeting stating clearly who does what when where with what tools and why. This is something that you should share with all the rest of the implementation team, so everyone understands their roles. You will find an example and a template of choreography for download below. Continue reading the Blueprints section to find examples of how to link the different activities together into a well-flowing programme.