Culture Garden - Youth Leadership for Collaboration

ABOUT THE COURSE
"Culture Garden - Youth Leadership for Collaboration" is a new 7-day residential training course for youth workers, social workers and educators.

The programme provides essential tools and practices, as well as opportunities for individual and group self-reflection, which empower young people to successfully connect, create and collaborate in their school, employment, and community contexts. The program engages with leadership, not as a quality held by one person or by a select few, but as a whole-group phenomenon. The governance practices a group uses; the ways that conflict, feedback, and communication are navigated; a group’s relationship to creativity and self-expression; its economic paradigms, and more, inform what kind of leadership it potentiates and responds to.

In the programme, participants are given experiential opportunities to learn and build confidence using the “cultural tools” that enable true connection, creativity and collaboration, while learning new ways to support youth to awaken to their own potential, curiosity, and inner motivation.

WHAT WE WILL DO

In this Culture Garden training course, we will combine these main elements:
* Critical analysis of the phenomenon of group culture and an overview of the frameworks, tools, and practices that support collaboration;
* Individual and whole-group experiential learning & practice;
* Creative/expressive and embodied activities to cultivate self-reflection, self-awareness and resilience

In order to:
* Empower young people to become more active participants in their local governments, economies, and communities, and to shape their local cultures towards a more collaborative ethos;
* Equip young people with the core skills and frameworks to succeed in the volatile and emergent conditions that are becoming the norm worldwide;
* Cultivate personal & group resilience in the face of change and uncertainty

OUR APPROACH
In today’s world, the need to respond to complex social, economic and environmental challenges is bringing people together across lines of difference, and calling for new ways to organise and act together in service of our local communities and the world. The need for practical and versatile skillsets for collaboration – with our friends, families, colleagues, and communities – is greater than ever. However, cultural expectations are developed and carried beneath our conscious awareness and are often more “felt” than “known.” 

Culture Garden helps groups to learn the skills and practices required to understand and engage with this hidden landscape: to identify the dynamics, needs, and issues at play in their cultural field; to compassionately release patterns that no longer serve their wellbeing; and, to become active participants in co-creating healthy group cultures that express their values and empower their work in the world. 

Simultaneously, we support groups to plan and enact the structural and systemic changes over time which allow their healthy group cultures to flourish. This is a multi-dimensional process which can include governance and decision making systems, strength based mapping of the organisational assets and needs, action planning, and role/task descriptions & supportive review processes to name a few structural supports. A healthy culture functions best when it is in a reciprocal and harmonious relationship with these more formal group processes. 

We call this practice Culture Gardening.