Purpose
This checklist reflects the key skills and observable behaviours for effectively facilitating community participation and empowerment. While these skills may not all be observed or needed for all activities or contexts in which communities’ are engaged, they represent the core competencies desirable in community facilitators. By harnessing these skills, community facilitators can enable community participants to freely express their opinions, ideas, and concerns, feel valued and respected, and help foster their sense of self-efficacy and ownership over change. This resource can be used as a self or peer assessment tool to help identify capacity strengthening needs and areas of improvement, inform training delivery, and support effective delivery of community development or engagement projects.
Keyword Search Tags
Project Phase:
Initiation Phase, Planning Phase, Implementation Phase, Exit & Evaluation Phase
Approaches for Working With Communities: Community Development Approach, Community Engagement Approach
Project Support: Facilitator Resources, Training
Community Facilitation Skills Checklist
- Did the facilitator come prepared to ensure activity/discussion ran smoothly and didn’t waste unnecessary time of participants? e.g. appropriate materials, understanding of the activity
- Did the facilitator sit/position themselves same level with participants?
- Did the facilitator explain the purpose of the discussion/activity before it started, and give an indication of how long it would last?
- Did the facilitator ask if participants had any questions before the session/exercise began?
- Did the facilitator their unsolicited opinions/information/answers rather than facilitate participants to discuss, reflect, learn, and identify their own ideas?
- Did the facilitator use open ended questions to help participants reflect and identify key learnings for themselves?
- Did the facilitator prevent domination of the activity/discussion by one or a few people, and encourage participation/input from others?
- Did the facilitator encourage equal participation from men and women and/or people who are marginalized or vulnerable?
- Did the facilitator encourage even shy/timid participants to speak/participate?
- Did the facilitator summarize the discussion and key learnings at the end?
- Did the facilitator ask participants for feedback on their experience of the discussion/activity at the end? This is important to understand the perspective of participants and whether they felt time spent was valuable to them, to enable them to make any improvements in the future.
- Did the facilitator make plans for follow up with the participants and/or ensure clear understanding of next steps?
- Did the facilitator record the outcome/result of the activity to ensure the community has a copy, and relevant information could be used to inform project planning?
- Was the facilitator engaging and respectful from the beginning to end of the visit?
For effective facilitation, the community facilitator must process the following skills: -
- Actively listen: Listening is the bedrock of good facilitation skills. Effective listening before and during a session/meeting is necessary to create a tailored and relevant learning process.
- Ask questions: Ask questions often during the session/meeting. This is a critical facilitation skill to move individual and group sharing and learning forward. Questions can be framed to accomplish different types of responses, such as to gain or focus attention, solicit information, give information, direct the thoughts of others, and close discussions.
- Be comfortable with silence: Often, questions are met with silence. Participants may need time to process the question, formulate a response, or think of other questions. However, silence can also mean that participants are confused or frustrated. With more experience, you can read nonverbal cues and know how best to address silence.
- Be flexible: You never know exactly how a session/meeting will go, who will be there, and what unexpected events will arise. Be flexible and willing to shorten an activity, add important language to a definition, or adapt an exercise.
- Stay focused on objectives: Select just one or two practices to focus on during a session/meeting, so that you can discuss them in more detail. If participant discussions get off-topic, refocus the group by using phrases such as “this is interesting to explore further at another time, but let’s return to the topic.” It is your responsibility to find the appropriate time to intervene, thank participants, and bring the conversation back to the objective.
- Use verbal and nonverbal encouragement: By using verbal and nonverbal cues, you can make participants feel more comfortable with sharing their thoughts and ideas. By nodding your head or agreeing with the participants as they are speaking, they will feel encouraged to continue sharing. It is also helpful to foster participation of shy or modest participants.
- Foster respect among participants: Mutual respect and trust between you and the participants and among the participants nurtures the learning process. Effective learning is supported through the constructive and supportive feedback of respected peers.
- Use participatory activities: When participants actively engage with others, they build capacities that are more effective, memorable, and easy to apply. Mix activity types so that there are opportunities to work alone, in small groups, and in one large group. Everyone in the room is a student and a facilitator.
- Build in time for reflection: The most effective learning takes place through “real world” experiences, including the opportunity to reflect, identify patterns, draw conclusions, and derive principles that will apply to similar experiences in the future. Allow time for participants to share their experiences and/or to respectfully share others’ experiences.
- Build in time for forward planning: Participants need time to practice their new skills, but also to consider ways in which to change their practices going forward. When talking about behaviour change, always include time to discuss barriers and enablers.
- Seek feedback: This will ensure that participants can freely express how they found the process, and what needs to be improved. A sample feedback form that can be adapted is presented below.
Resource Adapted from [128] [129]