Special Feature: Becoming and Being The Changemaker!

Nadia Chaney is a part of the Facilitation Team at PYE Global. A poet, writer, performance artist she is gifted with great communication skills and has the ability to understand multiple perspectives and put them with simplicity.  As part of the Dream A Dream – PYE Global Partnership, she was with us from 6^th Dec – 21^st Dec as a facilitator and trainer. Nadia worked with 20 people from the Dream Team on the core facilitation skills, training skills and approach to our work with children. In addition, the team also conducted a one day workshop for other key stakeholders in Dream Programs like the coaches, volunteers, NGO Partners and Service Partners was organized with the objective to spread the message of criticality of adopting child friendly approach to working with children and bringing them in sync with what Dream A Dream way of working. The training culminated with a 4-day camp for 40 children where the skills were practiced and learnings strengthened by the team.

Shalini Menon – Associate Manager, Dream Adventure Program, Navneet D – Program Champion, Fundraising and Communications and Uttam Kumar Nanda – Senior Coordinator- Administration share the learnings from participating in the Dream A Dream - PYE Global Advance Facilitation Training and learning to transform from doing to being. Shalini shares her insights and experiences with the training, For the Dream Team at Dream A Dream, December was a month full of learning, interactive workshops and some deep reflections. PYE Global’s return with their magic bag was one of the most eagerly awaited moments for the whole team. For in this magic bag, one was to find the most fun filled games, creative facilitation tools, a four day camp based on the PYE creative community model and a lot of laughter and more… The four themes explored at the PYE Global Advance Facilitation Training were Exploring the creative within Defining creativity and a ‘creative person’ helped in highlighting the importance of being aware and alert to our surrounding – “keeping that bulb switched on” in interpersonal communication. As we learned in these workshops, it is this creativity that helps us express ourselves to people around us and connects our work together”.

Non Violent Communication The team also got a chance to understand how relevant Non Violent communication is to our work and the people we work with. The team had a great time reflecting on usage of language and how we communicate in our everyday work to people around us. Overwhelming at times, we all agreed that ‘what we say’ and ‘how we listen’ can have such nourishing or damaging impact on human relationships and the work we do. The workshop helped us understand the cycle of ‘observations, expressing feelings and meeting needs’ while we communicate with each other.

The Experiential Learning Cycle As Dream a Dream continues to grow in its work with children, the workshops brought back our attentions to how our programs work, how we design our sessions and how we help a child take the life skills from a Dream a Dream program into his life. The team got a chance to understand the various stages in the experiential learning cycle, through a series of games and art activities, also allowing ourselves to lead some of them as facilitators. This process turned out to be extremely useful as learner’s learnt and connected each activity to their area of work.

Building the Learning Circle As an organization, while Dream A Dream continues to build people and their capacities as ‘social artists’, we look forward to create an eco system that allows people to build, share, and express knowledge through highly interactive and participatory workshops. Dream a Dream strongly believes that this collaborative approach to learning will further strengthen its work.

For Navneet, “This workshop on facilitation helped me strengthen our child centric approach in Dream Programs. For example, enhancing our skills on how to give instructions in a child friendly way through gestures, claps and one line songs, which immediately catches a child's attention instead of just being verbal. The two week rigorous training also taught games that children would connect with and feel engaged. It provided tools and techniques that would help in understanding better what a child feels and thinks in different situations, the challenges they face.  De-briefing techniques that would be useful in understanding of self and others.” Fpr Uttam it was about bringing his vision alive - "My dream is to setup an NGO in my native Kalahandi (Orrisa) and this training is going to be very useful".

At a personal level also, this has been a transformative experience for Uttam, "This camp has made me comfortable and given me confidence, when I joined Dream A Dream at that time I was very fear to ask question in front of group of people, I was not able to speak frankly in the meetings. This is the first workshop in my life, I learnt how to work with children, how to ask question, how to keep patience and how to work in team. I feel some special myself after the camp. Camp has made me feel confident, hopeful, fearless. I believe that, this opportunity has changed me and has brought me so many hopes in my life". ~ Uttam Kumar Nanda, Senior Coordinator, Administration.