Press Release

The TOCA team’s work honors, among many things, the power food has to bring people in a community together.  Whether or not you serve a homemade, gourmet meal or order pizza delivery, hosting a community dinner is a great way to celebrate your community change team – their individual talents, their plans for future work, or the successes they’ve created.  This activity, from the Innovation Center’s Collective Leadership Works toolkit, includes tips for hosting a successful community dinner.

Creating authentic youth-adult partnership require both parties to overcome traditional youth and adult roles.  It takes work, commitment, and intentionality.  Role-playing is one of the ways IC trainers help young people and adults prepare for youth-adult partnerships.  This activity, from the IC’s toolkit Creating Youth-Adult Partnerships, familiarizes participants with the dynamics of typical youth-adult relationships and challenges participants to improve their own relationships in constructive ways.

Service-learning – and all good community change work – places a strong emphasis on reflection.  When reflection is intentional – guided by specific goals and questions – it is a powerful way to learn from our experiences, evaluate our progress, and make improvements to future work. This activity, from the Innovation Center’s Reflect and Improve toolkit, sets the stage for constructive and meaningful reflection by introducing participants to the basic principles of evaluation.

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Sometimes, one of the greatest barriers to using the outdoors as a space for learning is simply knowing what natural resources your community offers.  When framed in the context of natural or environmental resources, community gridding engages participants in visualizing their community’s space with a fresh perspective. 

This activity, “Talking the Talk,” was one of the most effective and popular activities from the Learning Group Meeting.  It engages participants in actively learning about the principles and process of both collective leadership and service-learning.

Working in collaboration requires bringing different groups together.  Bridging gaps is a central feature of collective leadership; the gap most often bridged while using this approach is one of age.  This work is sometimes difficult and always requires intentionality.  Defining “youth” and “adult” – or at least discussing varying definitions of the terms – can ease the process.  How do you define “youth”?  How do you define “adult”?

Community work is strengthened when we involve a rich mix of people and organizations in our efforts.  However, in recruiting partners for community work, we too often look only to the usual suspects– companies, corporations, and formal volunteer organizations.  These are strong partners to enlist, but we should also consider the many informal sectors and networks that are also a part of our communities – recreational sports leagues, parent networks, high school clubs, even social media networks like those on Facebook.  This activity encourages you to include all