France - Helping a newborn in the Constellation network to grow up
Helping a newborn in the Constellation network to grow up - The story of France Competence
Although there are a lot of skilled Constellation facilitators in France, very few activities have been carried out thus far on the territory. Beside the experience in Redon with the Mutuelles du Pays de Redon, the work with the Amitoyens in Ferney, training organised in Geneva, France Competence is still looking for opportunities to practice more and to spread the use of the approach among groups and partners. But such limited activities in the hexagon is compensated by experience from accompaniment of groups outside of France. And it was mainly what we wanted to share with the participants of the GLF in Entebbe. Beside the presentation of the few activities happening in France, we wanted to illustrate two steps of the CLCP cycle: the “Who are we?” through the exercise of “What makes us human” and the “Where do we want to go?” and development of practices from any dream through a puzzle exercise.
What makes us human?
The purpose of the exercise is to ask participants/member of the group we are accompanying to first draw a human silhouette and to respond to the following two questions: a. What are the characteristics / qualities that make us human? Responses are done through individual writing on the silhouette, provoking individual reflection. As we proposed the exercise to GLF participants, here are the few answers we got: Our intellect / Empathy / Breath is the same / Care & Support / Appreciation / being attentive / To be valued / Conscious knowing right & wrong / team spirit / Loving older persons / Rendre service aux autres / Recognizing our own vulnerabilities as well as capacities for growth & change / feelings / feelings & decisions / don’t entertain worries : accept and go ahead / Engaging / Need to belong / our heart / Having great sense of community / our ability for introspection / Laughter.
b.If these are qualities that make us human, how would YOU like to be treated? Such question was addressed verbally with some participants and many of them recognized the importance of the appreciation, respect and tolerance.
The purpose of that exercise was mainly to help people to think about their own humanity and its aspects and what they can relate with as they interact with other people.
The stand was dispatching the various steps of the CLCP. On each of them we were showing / mentioning some tips and exercises used to facilitate each specific step. And we were asking visitors to indicated if they had other ways of facilitating these various steps. The step that crystallised more attention was about the dream development and the emergence of practices. We use the following diagrams as example to think about how practices can concur to the achievement of a dream. Visitors were asked to identify practices = behaviors or attitudes that could support the achievement of the following dream: “Our children are immunized according to schedule”. The diagram on the left are examples of possible practices. The idea was to highlight the link between practices and attitudes or behaviors and the complementarity of the practices for dream achievement. The following are suggestions from visitors about possible practices for such dream: “we perform regular home visits” / “opportunity for dialogue” / “consistency in our practices for achieving the dream” / “Play & Laughter” / “Spending quality time with our children” / “consistent check-up of the children” / “Awareness creation among parents on schedules for immunization”. An interesting suggestion about the dream building exercise was to change the question toward “Where do we want to BE (instead of to GO)?
That was the first time we took the opportunity to show some of the activities running on the french territory (and we did not even mention the partnership with IREPS Mayotte…). There is a high desire of the facilitators based in France to create more opportunities in order to further spread the approach among the huge associative sector as well as among institutions. Facilitators are scattered over very distant locations in France; it is a constraint that we will try to overcome during the coming years, with the full support of the Constellation.
