Getting Results that Matter for Kids

PHOENIX September 21, 2018

A team of LAUNCH Flagstaff partners participated in a two-day training on the topic of results based facilitation, convened by the Valley of the Sun United Way in Phoenix.   The outcome for this training was to help participants better facilitate partnership meetings that move from just talk into collaborative action.

The foundation of the collective impact work of LAUNCH Flagstaff is to serve as the neutral facilitator of conversation in meetings that produce actionable outcomes.  In the practice of results based facilitation, this neutrality is key.

“It has always felt natural to me to speak in the collective ‘we’ when facilitating a CAN meeting,” said LAUNCH Flagstaff Partnership Director Paul Kulpinski.  “But during the training, coaches helped us understand that using ‘we’ undermined our neutrality making it more difficult to empower the group to own the outcome.”

The training taught the importance of the roles and authority of the participants and how to create boundaries for group behavior.  The facilitation model ultimately focuses meeting results into an accountability framework that captures commitments made by participants to achieve the group’s objective.

According to Kulpinski, as the work of LAUNCH Flagstaff continues to expand, the need for consistent facilitation done by a variety of individuals will be paramount to the partnership’s success.  At this point, Kulpinski himself serves as the primary facilitator for CAN meetings but he recognizes that this is unsustainable.

“Training others in this model will better position LAUNCH Flagstaff to become more effective and more responsive while still maintaining consistency in quality of outcomes,” said Kulpinski.

In addition to LAUNCH Flagstaff, the other collective impact organizations that participated were Thriving Together – an initiative of the Valley of the Sun United Way, and the Cradle to Career Partnership – an initiative of the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona.

The training was provided by StriveTogether of Cincinnati Ohio.