April 25, 2013
Erik Badger

If you’re familiar with our Organizations program, you know that the centerpiece of it is what we call Circles of Change. Circles of Change is an innovative participatory education program that encourages democratic development and is designed for use in organizations, schools, churches, the workplace, or anywhere a group needs to learn how to work better together. The two key methods used are Reflection Circles (based on Touchstones in the US) and Open Space Technology. Together, they create a Circle of Change: a group of 20-30 participants who meet weekly for 6 months to practice these democratic methods with two qualified Haitian trainers guiding them through the process.

In response to the many particular needs of those we work with, in the last few years we have begun to adapt the program. We have integrated the Haitian constitution into reading lists to support civic education, created the founding documents for a community governance organization, and led groups to identify community priorities and create projects to address them. In the future, we envision creating our own volumes of texts centered around important themes.

Toward this end, from April 11-13 we held a discussion text writing workshop for a number of our most advanced trainers. The workshop was led by our long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Steven Werlin. Steven led the group through the process of identifying the theme their text would focus on, creating questions to help participants engage with it, and finally writing the full text. The group was very engaged with participants writing texts on a variety of relevant subjects including: corporal punishment in the family; environmental protection; the relationship between work and friendship; corruption; etc.

Haiti Partners is grateful to work with this great team and we look forward to seeing where this newest path for the Organizations program leads!