Preparation

This preparation guide helps you:

Identify who should be invited to the workshop
What materials and tools you need for the workshop and how to set them up
What information to send to your participants about the workshop
Where to find information about workshop accessibility
Where to find the workshop presentation materials

Identify participants

Understanding and solving complex problems requires a whole village of diverse backgrounds, skills, and stories. It is important to involve different stakeholders from our community in our mapping exercises.

Ideally, there should be a minimum of 6 participants to break into two smaller groups for the mapping activity.

You may find it helpful to brainstorm with other organizers about who to invite. Consider the following questions:

Who is most impacted by the problem?
Who has been affected by this problem recently?
Who has been affected by this problem for a long time?
Who are the community leaders?
Who has influence or power related to this problem?

And at the end, remember to ask:

Whose voice is not included in our invite list? Why? Should it be?

Set up tools and materials

This workshop is designed to be hosted virtually to make it easier for community members to join, participate, and learn together. The lecture and discussion portions of the workshop are hosted on Zoom, a video conference tool. The exercise portion of the workshop is hosted on Miro, an online whiteboard tool.

Hosts and participants will need access to:

A laptop or desktop computer (unfortunately, Miro does not work well on phones or tablets)
The Internet

Participants may also use their phone to call into the workshop without participating in the hands-on exercise.

Note: You may substitute Zoom with your favorite video conferencing system. You may also substitute Miro with your favorite white board tool (e.g., Mural, Lucidspark, Microsoft Whiteboard, a real-life white board).

Prep whiteboard

If you are using Miro and not another white board tool, sign up for Miro and familiarize yourself with the tool. You may find the following tutorials helpful:

Then make a copy of the Causality Mapping Exercise template. To do this:

Open the template
Select all contents on the board
Click the three dots and then select “Copy”
Create a new Miro board, and then right-click to select “Paste”
Change the permission settings on the board so that your community members can access and edit it (See: Sharing Boards and Inviting Collaborators: Sharing boards via a public link)

You might want to have a friend confirm that they can access your Miro board!

Send invitations

When you promote the workshop on your event page and in the invitations, be sure to include information about:

What participants should expect
What participants will need to participate
What accessibility accommodations and limitations participants should expect

You can modify the email template linked below to meet your community’s needs:

Connecting the Dots Email Template

Access all workshop materials

Coordinate access

Following the recommendations in the Accessibility Guide, coordinate ASL interpretation and CART live captioning for your video call, as well as any other requested access needs.

Remember to communicate the accessibility of your workshop to your community members! If someone does not know if the event is accessible to them, they may not even try to attend; or, they may become frustrated when they find that they are excluded through lack of access.

Review workshop materials

Review and make a copy of the Slides and Script. Make whatever adjustments you need to the slides and script to meet your community’s needs.

Creative Commons Attribution: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit us and license your new creations under the identical terms.