Participation
Works – Really!
A lifetime
of service. That was the story that guided my life through all of the 20th
century. Working as a pastor and teacher, civil rights activist, peace
protester, community-builder, non-profit executive. Now in my early sixties, in
good health, employability in question but not ready for retirement, Linda and
I assessed our combined experience and acquired skills. We decided to put
together a home-based business that could be a source of self-support and
provide needed services to organizations committed to the same causes that had
caught our passion for making a difference in the world.
Our years
of work with the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) provided us with training
and field experience in methods for social change and community development.
Thirteen years running a nonprofit anti-hunger organization gave us lots of
hands-on and close-up experience with organizational growth and development.
After spending a couple of years exploring possibilities, we decided to go full
time. We adopted the name Participation
Works for our new venture, and decided to operate as a sole proprietorship,
with Linda as owner and me as her one employee. This seemed only fair, since I
got to be chief executive of FOOD FOR ALL for more than a decade, with Linda
reporting to me. Besides, she was more skilled as a facilitator and trainer than
I was.
We wrote a
business plan and created a simple logo for our business cards, stationary and
marketing materials.
Relying on referrals from friends and acquaintances who
knew our work, we began to get a few jobs. We also continued our connection to
the ICA and their network of training courses known as Technology of
Participation (ToP). We conducted two-day courses in group facilitation methods
and strategic planning, offered a couple of times a year in the Southern
California region. This helped us develop a network of contacts, since most of
the course participants were executives and volunteers with nonprofit service
organizations.
With some
skill and a bit of luck, calls for our services began to grow. This was
assisted somewhat by the shift in leadership philosophy that was beginning to take
hold in many nonprofit organizations, from a “top-down” to a more collaborative
and participative style. Hence, our name Participation
Works was not only good branding but an accurate description of an
effective approach. Organizations that really put to work the methods we were
teaching them found that they were getting their work done with a lot less time
wasted and energy spent trying to arrive at decisions.
Our approach
was simple. Neither Linda nor I were ever interested in or good at marketing
ourselves. When we began our business the Internet and social marketing were
just being born. We had to depend on word-of-mouth networking and referrals
from anyone who knew us and our work. We were fortunate that there were not
many skilled facilitators in the Inland Empire, our targeted geography. There
were consultants of all kinds, but the field of facilitation was still
relatively in its infancy.
I will
attempt to describe the difference between a consultant and a facilitator:
·
A
consultant usually has some expertise in a particular area, such as finance,
fundraising, organizational development, and gathers information from people
within and outside an organization, then writes up recommendations or a
complete plan for the group to execute;
·
A
facilitator brings only skills in group process and uses them to bring together
all elements within the organization, helping them to achieve a consensus by
drawing on the knowledge and experience within the organization itself.
This means
that the usual result of a planning process that is facilitated is a plan where
there is buy-in from all levels of an organization and where group members express
“We created the plan ourselves.” Plans written up by consultants often are much
more expensive and reside on a bookshelf in an office, gathering dust.
The Participation Works approach was, after
receiving a call expressing interest in our services, Linda would pre-qualify a
potential client on the phone by asking questions aimed at learning about the
organization and what experience they had already had with strategic planning.
The next step was a two-hour meeting with a representative group from the
organization, in order to clarify for them how we work and design a
one-and-a-half to two-day planning retreat. Often potential clients were
skeptical that they could produce a real three to five-year plan that could
actually be implemented. We assured them it was possible. In our first few
years we were giving these assurances with less confidence than after getting
feedback from clients who found that these methods worked in their
organizations. Several called us back for second and third strategic planning
retreats as they found that board and staff changes, as well as changes in
their environments, required responsiveness and new directions on their part. A
number of clients began to ask us for help in implementing their plans, so we
developed quarterly and annual reviews that allowed them to keep their plans
ever-fresh and current. A few nonprofits began sending their staff and board
members to our group facilitation methods courses and adopting our planning
methods throughout their organizations.
For the
first couple of years of the first decade of the 21st century we
combined five nonprofit clients with six ICA training courses. Most of these
were two-day gigs with organizations varying in size from small all-volunteer
groups to well-established nonprofits with staff and enough in their budgets to
pay us our modest fee. Participation Works gained its reputation for doing good
work for a reasonable price. Sometimes we were so reasonable that we were lucky
to cover our gas and materials expenses, but always for a good cause: Some
struggling nonprofit group needing to determine a new direction or re-energize
itself to better serve its clientele.
Fortunately,
for our own self-support needs, I turned 65 in 2002 and began collecting Social
Security income and automatically received Medicare. One good selling point
became that our clients got two for the price of one. We had found our niche
and continued to work within it through the rest of the decade, averaging ten
to fifteen new and repeat clients per year, along with conducting the three to
four Technology of Participation (ToP) training courses each year. Clients
ranged from small to large, startups to long-established, many different fields
of service, domestic abuse prevention, animal shelters, hospitals, foundations,
radio stations, a few small cities, and some county government agencies.
I made
several feeble attempts at retiring during the decade, even declaring when I
reached my 70th birthday that I was leaving Participation Works and
Linda should find another facilitator to work with. But there always seemed to be
another client that desperately needed help, and somehow Linda would convince
me I was indispensable. I must admit I was always motivated by feeling needed,
and the ‘life of service’ mantra I had always tried to live by kept playing in
the back of my mind. I think I fully retired when I was somewhere in my early
seventies. I’m not sure because since Linda retired a couple of years ago, she
keeps selectively volunteering with groups that fit with the causes we believe
in, and I keep agreeing to help.
And so it
goes.
