Having good meetings can make a huge impact on the satisfaction members have with their coop, and can also be a powerful way of encouraging deeper involvement from all of your membership. NASCO has worked with groups across the continent for over thirty years, and has also cultivated connections with the broader cooperative and non-profit sector, and has used these connections to build excellent training materials for groups looking to improve their meetings.
Four roles of a facilitator at group meetings.
Tips for having the hard conversations in your group, developed at the 2007 Anti-Oppression Action Camp
You can use this tool creatively, adapting the intensity of the 4 basic principles to different situations, depending on the level of risk being taken in each setting. Some components of these tools may be inappropriate for some settings, and invaluable in others. The more personal risk involved, the more carefully you want to frame the space at the outset, because a secure anchor is the only thing that will enable a process to fly to the heights of its potential.
Education for Social Change, an excerpt from 'Educating for a Change.'
This document provides a guide to parliamentary procedure; what is it? how does it work? what are its advantages and disadvantages?
The following approach to facilitation and decision-making outlined in this document is a modified consensus process which came out of the June 2006 NASCO Board meeting after a good deal of discussion and experimentation with different meeting processes. The process outlined below is something of a hybrid, which attempts to combine some of the clarity and formality of Roberts Rules with the participatory and flexible nature of consensus processes.
A list of both positive and negative group roles
Techniques for problem solving in meetings.
Minute Taking can be complex, tricky and challenging. Minute takers are often expected to produce concise and coherent summaries out of chaotic and disorganized meetings. Many are directed to take minutes without documented guidelines on what to record and what to leave out, and without a prior explanation of issues and technical terms used at a meeting.
