About

Through this workshop, participants learn about advocacy tools and community engagement strategies, gain confidence to participate in political initiatives and establish connections with like-minded individuals, ultimately working together to develop plans for working with local communities to implement local actions and wider advocacy efforts.

Purpose and objective

Citizens, and young citizens especially, are interested in environmental issues – it’s enough to look at surveys on the topic, membership numbers in environmental NGOs or public protests that periodically roll across the streets. What sometimes stands in a way of effectiveness of these popular political actions is lack of knowledge and skills in environmental advocacy and community organisation. Such skills can contribute highly to the power of bottom-up actions calling for policy change. Ultimately, then, this workshop format aims to equip and empower committed citizens to push for action on pollinators through joint advocacy efforts. The indirect aim of this workshop is to create a community of like-minded people who can support each other in advocacy actions, facilitating a bottom-up approach to influencing governance systems. Although the process is framed as capacity building, it culminates with collaborative development of projects.

Format

The workshop largely follows a training format, which should be familiar to most people. However, moving away from classical educational approaches, the training follows the principles of peer-to-peer learning, learning by doing, interactivity and reciprocity between all involved, making sure participants and facilitators connect and engage as critical thinkers. It also places a lot of stress on team building activities and creating a collaborative and inclusive environment. This latter is achieved for instance by accommodating different learning styles through a diversity of activities. 

As this process includes building of a network, but takes place online, it is very important to focus on supporting the interactions between participants and helping them to get to know each other. This, in turn, also requires the creation of a supportive, safe and welcoming environment. For this reason the event should include many opportunities for getting to know each other, check-ins and energisers.

This format is run online as this provides an opportunity for individuals from different locations to connect and share diverse perspectives and experiences, increasing the scope for mutual learning.

Preparations

Team

A key team member for this process is someone with extensive knowledge and experience in advocacy and community engagement. Such person is necessary not only for developing materials and leading the discussion, but also should have wide ranging connections across NGOs, which constitute important partners. Additionally, as this is an online process making extensive use of digital tools, dedicated team member for managing these and acting as a technical moderator during the event is necessary. See below a possible breakdown of team members and their respective tasks for this type of process. This is something you should develop in the early stages of project planning to understand better who you need and to make the distribution of responsibilities clear to everyone in the later stages of work. 

Recruitment

This process can work well with an open call, as it presupposes a desire for involvement in advocacy actions. Thus, the process targets citizens who already have some interest, but are not sure where to start. The open call can be done via partner’s websites, mailing lists, newsletter, social media etc., as interested citizens will likely already be looking for information in such fora. Partners’ reputation and involvement in the communication actions will play a key role in attracting participants. 

Communication

After finalising recruitment, several days before the event, the participants are sent a booklet containing key information about the process, including an introduction to the topic of pollinators and advocacy, agenda for the event, bios of all the team members and of the invited guests as well as basic info on the digital tools that will be used during the meeting and the methods that will be used (e.g., the strong focus on interactivity and learning-by-doing, so participants don’t arrive expecting lectures).

To keep in touch after the project, communication channels to maintain engagement with participants after the training courses should be established – but this should be decided together with the participants based on the channels that they already use. Ideally, such channels would be initiated already during the event, to give an initial push. 

Set up of online space

For this project, taking place entirely online and including a lot of group collaborations, it is helpful to have one virtual space where all the work takes place. This can be done using a large digital whiteboard, where different ‘stations’ corresponding to consecutive activities are located. Over the course of the event, participants move from ‘station to station’, being able to easily go back to check previous work or move some outputs from one to another. It is important that the organiser sets up this space beforehand and participants have some time to get familiar with it. Below, you can see the global view of such a whiteboard used in one of the pilot workshops. As we go through the activities you will discover close-ups to better see the content.

Event roll-out

Opening: Set the grounds for collaboration! (1h)

As online meetings rarely start quite on time, have some fun activity to welcome participants as you wait for everyone to log in. Participants can draw on a digital whiteboard food items they had for breakfast that depend on pollinators or look through photos of pollinators to identify which ones they have seen in their area. 

When everyone is in, introduce the team, the purpose of the workshop and the plan for the upcoming days. From this, move directly to a >check-in activity like Fears, Expectations and Contributions (see the pictures below for an example) in order to understand how participants relate to the upcoming work together. 

Directly following this, draw up a >contract, that can take into consideration the contributions from the previous exercise (for instance how to address some of the fears that participants expressed). Developing a contract on the digital whiteboard, by annotating and moving around post-its with proposals, will be also a try-out for using the digital space.

Taking care for your hive: Find the meaningful connection! (0.5h)

To give participants a moment off-screen after the opening, invite everyone – including the organising team – to get off the computer and find two things: one that represents their relationship with pollinators and another that symbolises activism for them. This activity helps participants articulate the >meaningful connection they already have with the topic, thus creating an inspiring collection of motivations for the whole group. After everyone is back, send participants into smaller break out groups to discuss the objects they brought. During this conversation, invite them to take pictures of the objects, upload them to the whiteboard and add a comment in the dedicated station. This way you give participants an opportunity to try out a type of whiteboard functionality that will be relevant later on in the process.

Noticing: Reflect on pollinators and their problems! (1h)

After this personal entry point into the topic, move on to exploring the world of pollinators and the issues they confront. You can do this through >Problems tree. If you are working with more than 10 people, divide participants in smaller groups and send them into breakout rooms to discuss the different causes and effects of the decline. A good idea might be to divide participants by areas of interest, that you pre-define earlier, e.g., farming, climate change, cities, biodiversity, or other categories that might be more fitting for the process. When in breakout rooms, participants nevertheless work on the same Tree on the digital whiteboard, adding post its with ideas.

After about 20 minutes, bring everyone back to plenary for a discussion. As the first step, you might want to clean up the board by merging and removing duplications. Facilitators can help with that. Meanwhile, this is a great opportunity to bring in an expert – e.g., an entomologist or ecologist to comment on the contributions of participants. Next, open the floor to a discussion. An important point at this stage will be to understand from the contributions what participants are concerned about, as this can already set some directions for further work.

Taking care for your hive: Look away form the screen and in the the real world! (15 min)

To take a small screen break, invite participants to get off the computer, walk over to the window and look out for few minutes. Do they see one of the problems that have come up during the discussion? Come back and invite a few participants to share what they saw.

Sense-making: Discover the best place to intervene in the system! (1.5h)

By the end of the previous activity, you will see a whole lot of problems, and this can be quite depressing. A good idea might be to, before finishing off the day, carry out one more activity that will leave participants with a sense of hope, and give them something to chew on before the next meeting. This can be a >systems thinking exercise, where you invite participants to translate the causes and effects onto the Iceberg Model. One important part of this activity will be to explain well not just systems thinking and the Iceberg Model, but also the concept of leverage points (a.k.a places to intervene in the system) – as this will be the basis for identifying the concrete advocacy actions later on. To finish this activity, give participants a homework exercise: think of which place in the system they would like to intervene. This will create a thread connecting them to the workshop during the break.

Closing: Find ways to stay in touch! (0.5h)

At the end of the first day, create a communication channel through which participants can stay in touch outside of the meetings. While participants might be fine with using the digital whiteboard as a meeting place, it might be unwieldy for conversations, and so a dedicated communication application might be a good addition. 

To finish the day, >evaluate with participants the first day of work, e.g. through the Climer Cards. This can give you precious information about how to adjust the next two meetings to fit with the specific group of participants you are working with.

Opening: Choose your path! (1h)

After welcoming participants and checking in with them, return to the homework – what places in the system would they want to intervene at? To start easy, send participants into breakout rooms in threes for a conversation about their ideas, in two rounds, reshuffling them from one to another. After the second round, let participants think for a while on their own which thematic area they would like to work on from the ones discussed. At the end of this session participants should form thematic working groups.

Noticing: Jump into the policy jungle! (2h)

This next session moves from thematic interest to the exploration of the policy landscape governing that thematic area that participants would need to understand in order to develop effective interventions. For this example, we focus on the EU level, but you can adapt the blueprint to national or local levels. At the EU level, the starting point for any policy conversation on pollinators are Pollinators Initiative, EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 and the Nature Restoration Law. Invite a policymaker or policy analyst to speak about these, but also about the processes through which the policies are developed – always leaving plenty of time for asking questions and conversations.   

For the next stage of this activity, divide participants into groups, according to the policy area of interest, and send them off to breakout rooms to dive deeper into policies within their specific domain by carrying out a ‘digital safari’, discussing the results and coming up with questions they would like to ask to the policy expert. After return to the plenary, invite each of the groups to shortly summarise the results of their research and to ask questions to the expert.  

Noticing: Discuss with the veterans! (1.5h)

After discussing policies and how they are made, time comes for discussing how to influence them, what tools and strategies are available and who to target. For this session, invite several activists – and even lobbyists! – who have solid experience in environmental advocacy. Even better if you can get those who worked on the topic of pollinators. To make this session more engaging, run the discussion as a roundtable, asking questions and allowing the speakers to answer them and then complement – or question – each other. Meanwhile invite participants, as they listen, to fill in a table on the digital whiteboard with key observations on tools and strategies, skills and team members needed as well as key players to target. At the same time, using post-its of another colour, participants can put in questions relating to each of these categories – throughout the roundtable, the moderator can pick up these questions and integrate them into the conversation. Participants can of course be invited to ask these questions themselves, but as not everyone will immediately feel comfortable to speak in front of experts, writing questions anonymously can be a good complementary option.

To close the activity, divide participants into groups, this time randomly, and send them to break out rooms, including also one speaker from the roundtable per each room. Invite participants to speak with the guests about a tool or a strategy they found most interesting or insightful. Beyond consolidating the knowledge acquired, this part of the session aims to build a closer rapport between newcomers to the field and the veterans, to bring inspiration and confidence to the former.  

Closing: Reflect together! (0.5h)

For the closing of the second day, leave time for open conversation with sharing of impressions. This is a day heavy in information, some of which might be new and difficult to process. Encourage participants to speak openly about the parts that they found particularly challenging. You can use this knowledge to include extra info points in the next session. 

Co-design: Retrace the steps and then jump forward! (1.5h)

The first step of the co-design process is to revisit the road already travelled through this course. This means first going back to the Problems Tree and the Iceberg Model to identify the concrete problems participants would like to work on. While starting with the initial post-its, the thematic working groups should be able to further define the problem, given their new knowledge on policy. From this point on, participants can use the >Theory of change canvas to help them structure their thinking. 

Next, looking at the policy context relevant to this issue, invite participants to brainstorm on the question: What concrete solution or intervention could be implemented to address this issue? Is your aim to support the implementation of the policy or to influence the policy change (harder!)? 

Once the group defines the problem and the intervention they would like to implement, time comes for defining concrete steps and strategies. To start with this, the groups can revisit the conversations with activists, looking through the tools and strategies proposed there and expanding from that. Finally, the groups carry out the stakeholder analysis, e.g. using the >actor power matrix.  

Taking care for your hive: Open the space to see what’s still needed! (1h)

This activity, using the Open Space Technology method, aims to address the missing pieces - questions, doubts and uncertainties that individuals or groups might still have that are necessary for them to finalise their plans but which have not yet been addressed. These should be transformed into questions that can become a starting point for a conversation that could be of interest to other participants as well. 

Co-design: Finalise the advocacy ideas! (1.5h)

For the second round of co-design, the working groups reassemble to finalise their ideas based on the discussions in Open Space. 

Closing (1h)

To close, all the groups are invited to >share the ideas they have developed and to get feedback. The approach here can be, e.g., to use Clarifying Questions, which helps project owners to think through more tricky aspects of their plan or those considerations they have not thought about, but always requiring the project owners to find the solution.

Finally, to >evaluate the workshop invite the participants to assess their experience using, e.g., Climer Cards.

Follow-up

After few weeks, meet-up with the participants to discuss with them how things are going. This includes both a round of presentations on what the participants have done in their projects, and a subsequent discussion on the stumbling blocks and challenges they have encountered.  

Credits

This workshop format is based on two online training courses that brought together members of youth environmental organisations with the aim of equipping young people with tools for community action and advocacy. The pilot project was developed and run by Venetia Galanaki in 2020.