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Eva Rothwell Resource Centre
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, November 2007
Challenge: to use an open community meeting to get feedback from stakeholders
Location: The former Robert Land school in Hamilton
Date: November 2007
Client Contact: Don MacVicar, Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Eva Rothwell Resource Centre
FWB team: Jim Ridge, Nabil Rashidi, Jessica Tudos, Aaron Dus, John Sedgwick
“Tons of ideas and huge input...The community have never had such a fine team to assist them in planning the future. The people have spoken and you have recorded and now we can prioritize to plan into the future. Facilitators Without Borders have exceeded our expectations. Great work.”
— Don MacVicar, Chairman of the Board of Directors
The Background
The Eva Rothwell Resource Centre, (ERRC), at Robert Land school offers high quality educational, nutritional, social and recreational programming for the residents of the Keith Neighbourhood and beyond. Services include material outreach (clothing, furniture and a Community Pantry) as well as a student breakfast program, after school Homework Club, seniors' social, a mothers' support group, a Community Policing Office, a satellite medical clinic through North Hamilton Community Health Centre, Teen Zone drop-in program, recreation of all descriptions, summer day camp, and many special events.
The Challenge
The Board of Directors of the ERRC are mandated to hold an open community meeting prior to the annual general meeting. At these open forums they attempt to get feedback from all interested parties and stakeholders in the city, region and neighbourhood. In addition to a review of the current activities, they seek input into how they might alter, augment or add to the list of services and programs on offer. In past years these meetings were both poorly attended and fractious. The chairman of the Board approached FWB asking for assistance in running the session.
Planning The Event:
The event was scheduled for a Friday evening and the venue was the gym at this former high school, now the ERRC. The neighbourhood is perhaps the poorest in the city, with a mix of ethnic backgrounds and a high crime rate. Getting people to attend such a meeting to suggest ideas for improving their community centre would be the first hurdle. The second was to design the event so as to minimize any potential disruption and to maximize the inputs and sense of involvement from those who did attend.
The FWB team had the assistance of two staff members at the centre; Bethany Jones and Ted Hodkinson, along with the strong support of Don MacVicar from the Board. There was a limited budget for promotional flyers and for refreshments on the night of the event.
We were told that attendance in the past had been generally around 20 to 30 people, some with strong conflicting views about the Centre, but there was no way of estimating how many would come and from what constituency, as the format was clearly open to all.
We devised our plan around billing the session as "A fun evening of brainstorming with lots of opportunities for people to interact with others and to be creative, while helping the Centre grow".
The Event:
On the night of the event we had 67 people in the room, plus staff and facilitators. People of all ages, and all of them very energetic. After a brief welcome and some contracting we set to the task. People were invited to self-select into 5 possible sub-groups to work on "Their Vision for the Centre". The groups were as follows:
- Mindmapping with Jim Ridge
- Collage Making with Jessica Tudos
- Story Telling with Aaron Dus
- Building our Neighbourhood Map with Nabil Rashid
- Idea Generation with John Sedgwick
The reports from each of the five small groups showed a surprising consistency of needs and wants as well as some interesting and unique perspectives that arose in each of the groups. A rough convergence was done at the end of the evening, however, the final sifting of all the ideas and the preparation of these ideas to take to the Board, was done by the client, Don MacVicar and his team.
The Follow-up:
The immediate feedback was that the participants both enjoyed the experience and saw excellent results. The client was very positive about the turnout , the energy in the room and the high volume of ideas. Further, many of those present indicated that they would now be willing to be active in the implementation of these ideas, since they had been asked to participate in this way. The FWB team viewed the event as a success and the FWB coordinator is in regular email contact with the organization.