Organize the Community for Action

Objectives and content of the orientation meeting

As you plan this orientation meeting, you should think first about what your objectives are, what you hope to accomplish as a result of this event. Some of the more common objectives for this important meeting include:

To introduce team members to the community
To begin to develop good rapport with and among community members (especially if your team is new in this community and/or if community members don't know each other)
To make participants aware of and interested in the CM health issue
To help participants understand the goals of the CM program
To enable participants to learn in general about the CM process
To decide on next steps
To help participants develop a set of working norms (if they're going to be working together subsequent to this meeting)

Once you've decided on the objectives, you will then need to plan the content of the meeting: the topics you are going to cover, in what order, and who will be responsible for what content. Depending on your agenda, you may want to give some thought to who would be the best spokesperson for the various topics you plan to cover, which team member or community member the audience would most readily identify with or listen to on this particular topic.

Most orientation sessions include, at a minimum:

Participant and CM team member introductions.
An introduction to who you are, what your organization does/does not do.
A discussion about the health issue this CM program will address, including why this issue was selected and some basic information about the current status of the CM health issue. It is important to link this information with the participants' own experience. This type of discussion lends itself to asking participants to tell their own stories about how the CM health issue has affected them, their families and communities. This can be done creatively using words, pictures, dance, drama, puppets or other engaging methods that participants may relate to.
A presentation of the program goals.
A brief description of the process that the CM team proposes to use.
A discussion on how the participants want to work together, including: which days and times are best for meetings; who else should be invited; participant-determined norms, such as confidentiality, being on time, listening to others, asking questions when you don't understand something, etc. If this is an information session only, you will probably decide these questions at a later meeting.
Determining next steps: when and where the next meeting will be, who will be responsible for hosting the meeting, who will be invited, who will prepare food (if food is commonly available at meetings), etc.

(A "General Session Design Worksheet" is provided in the "Useful Tools" section at the end of this phase. This worksheet, based on experiential learning theory and practice, helps you plan group meetings during all phases of the community mobilization process.)

Be careful not to pre-empt the community