Use This Note-Taking Guide As a Companion Resource to the Our Children, Our Community

Use this note-taking guide as a companion resource to the Our Children, Our Community, Our Change Citizen's Action Guide to help you plan for your conversation, document your discussion, and craft action steps!

Preplanning:

Identify your context: Who is your audience?

Define your group’s purpose: What are your personal hopes for the group?

Define your timing: How much time do you have to work with?

Adapt for your needs: How will you focus your content?

Access additional resources: Do you have everything you need (knowledge of EDI, etc.)?

Record the conversation and identified action steps: How will you capture the next steps? How will you create accountability for your group to follow through on identified actions?

Our Children, Our Community, Our Change

Discussion to Action

Adapt and use this to capture your group’s discussions, and identify the next steps!

Focus: What is your group discussion focused on (domain, neighborhood, question)?

Personal reflections: What are the themes coming from individuals?

Discussion: Are there any additional ideas or pieces of information that come up?

Observations: What does your group believe are some of the contributing factors to current community conditions and outcomes your group noted?

Generative solutions: What are some of the next actions = identified?

Consensus: Is there a direction the group is heading?

Next steps: What are the next steps that will ensure a strong plan of action?

Post-planning

This could be a part of a series of meetings, tackled if your group has time, or as a follow up to your meeting:

Focus: What are the three (or fewer) priority actions that you and this group can tackle?

Commit: Pick one to which you will hold yourselves accountable.

Long-term vision:

Short-term plan: Make it a SMART goal:
What will you specifically do?
How will you measure it?
Is this attainable?
Is this reasonable?
Is this time-bound?
Create a clear statement: “By June 2017, our group will have shared child care information with all 30 churches in our neighborhood cluster.”

Follow up: How will you stay in touch or hold yourselves accountable?

Share it out: Share your ideas back with Our Children, Our Community, Our Change at our website: RaiseDC.org/ourchildren