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6th Annual Poverty and Opportunity Training Forum

Learn, Connect and Act

April 3, 2019 | Wednesday

The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) is pleased to partner with Vermont’s Community Action Agencies to host the Poverty & Opportunity Training Forum at Lake Morey, Fairlee, VT.

There will be over 30 workshops by experts about innovation and cross cutting skills for changing lives of low income Vermonters.  The event is full with over 300 people registered.

Location: Lake Morey Inn in Fairlee, VT

Agenda-at-a-Glance

07:30 – 08:15 Pre-workshop activity: Walking Meditation Practice. Please pre-register. Meet in the lobby.

07:00 – 09:00 Check in and light breakfast in lobby.

09:00 – 10:15 Opening Remarks and Keynote in Terrace Ballroom.

10:30 – 11:45 Workshop Sessions. Please pre-register.

11:45 – 01:00 Lunch in the Terrace Ballroom.

01:00 – 02:15 Workshop Sessions. Please pre-register.

02:30 – 03:45 Workshop Sessions. Please pre-register

03:45 -03:50 Reflections of the day in Lobby.

04:00 Adjoun

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Keynote:
The Keynote: H. LUKE SHAEFER,  Director, Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan; Associate Professor, School of Social Work; Associate Professor, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

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Capacity For Change: When Do You Know the Time Is Right?

I was meeting with a client today to discuss the status of a project that relied on the readiness or capacity of the client and their partners.  My presentation included:

  • The resources that existed and did not exist
  • The costs for these resources
  • The competing priorities facing the partners and
  • My assessment of the readiness for change, connected to a recent dialogue about one of the competing priorities.

As it were, the client had very similar ideas and added other factors to the equation.  The client was experiencing turnover in staff and just trying to address the day-to-day operations.  The timing to make and follow through on a plan for change was not good because their human resources were limited.  They wanted to make sure they could fulfill the needs of daily operations and equally important to them was to take care of themselves.

There are many tools available to assess readiness or capacity within a unit or program, organization, or system. Check out the Marguerite Casey Foundation Organizational Capacity Assessment Tool that covers some of the essential components needed for change.  In a Forbes article by Dov Seidman, How Human Is Your Company, the case is made for why corporate humanity is important and that “assessing our company’s humanity also tells us about our company’s capacity for performance”.

Some assessments of capacity are better than others.  It is important to take stock in how people feel in their current situation and the stress that may contribute to the organization’s capacity to perform and make a change.  Dialogue and discussion with individuals and teams can add context to the assessment results.  I refer to this as checking on the gut factor.

Peter F. Drucker, management guru
Peter F. Drucker, management guru

My gut was telling me the project was not going anywhere.  It was more important to me to check in on what the client was feeling about the project and their own capacity before attempting to move it forward even if this meant I could not bill for the project.  It is not worth it to go through the motions and end up with nothing substantive for the client in the end.  Peter Drucker who was quoted in the Seidman article said, “There is a difference between doing the next thing right, and doing the next right thing.”

The client and I decided to opt out of the project.

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Designing Healthy Workplaces

The New England Area of the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) hold their Professional Development Conference: Learning From Each Other, located in Falmouth, Mass. on Tues., Nov. 17, and Wed., Nov. 18, 2015.

One of the workshops offered will be, Designing Healthy Workplaces: The Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace Healthy Workplace Participatory Program.

Register for the conference.

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Healthy Organizations Plan for Change

Employees experience changes in the work place and in their personal life. Business sales and services change too and employees are expected to adapt and meet demands. How does an organization  support employees to sustain a healthy business and healthy and happy staff that meet the challenges of change?

A healthy organizational predicts the cycles of their business long before the change occurs and develops a plan for change. An effective plan considers the consequences change has on employees in the work place. For example, a hotel in Vermont typically experiences high volume during fall as the leaves change. A business can plan for how employees give excellent customer service as job stress increases when the hotel is booked full, every day. One strategy may be to offer in-house workshops to teach stress management techniques during months when there are fewer visits. Another strategy is to embed quick 15 minute structured stress breaks during the work day.  A stress break can be a brisk walk or yoga exercises.

By making a plan for change and establishing procedures or policies to support change, an organization creates a healthy work place for its employees, better productively and healthy bottom line for the business. A plan for change is the ounce of prevention equal to the pound of cure for any healthy organization.

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Top Three Practices When Working With Teams

These are my top three practices that apply no matter the stage of development a team has reached (e.g. forming, storming, norming, and performing).

  1. Communicate the reason the team was pulled together in words that resonant with employees.  Managers and supervisors may initially pull teams together for the organization to accomplish a goal.  For some individuals, it helps to sit down to discuss why he or she is needed on the team and consider how the team’s work benefits their work.
  2. Organize simply when the team meets by using agendas and recording key decisions the team made.  This helps reduce confusion if the team finds they need to refer back to these prior decisions and agenda items.
  3. Celebrate the process as well as the product the team achieves.  The team that embraces the process, which includes bringing up different views and debate or conflict in a constructive way, will build trust and respect in one another.

So the next time you head out to meet with your team with less enthusiasm because you have a deadline to meet, remember why it is important for you to be there.  Ask for or help build the agenda to stay on time and on topic.  Be engaged for the good of the whole team and you will reap the benefits of a job well done.