Emily is a full-time facilitator at Your Own Place. She’s currently working on a variety of projects, including facilitating flexible workshops at different Supported Housing Schemes in Colchester, and supporting individuals accessing Food Hubs in and around Norwich.
Walking back into the training room at Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney, I am filled with joy. I see everything set up fastidiously, hand-drawn pictures to represent values and topics, the table covered in brown paper to encourage doodling.
Three months earlier I walked into the same room to set up for Train the Trainer, four days of training to support professionals to deliver our Tenancy and Money workshops. I applied brown paper to the walls, placed hand-written and drawn cards back to front, and readied my laptop to share simple one-page plans.
The Your Own Place team have been working for over a year on perfecting the templates for our “One-Page Plans”: these are designed to support facilitators to set up for, remember key steps of, and summarise our signature activities.
One-page plans include:
○ The “Why” of an activity
○ A list of essential resources
○ Steps of the activity
○ Related places to go for support
○ Summary points
○ A photo or diagram of the activity set up
○ A photo or diagram of the completed activity
These have become essential for training people to deliver Your Own Place activities – they simplify the key points of the process of the activity, making it easy for someone to pick up and deliver. It was a fantastic team effort to create these for so many activities – we’ve done all the planning, lived-experience tested the activities, and now we want to share them to support people who want to deliver them.
Hugely proud of these resources – they are a visual skeleton, reminders of the steps. What we are known for is engaging with people others describe as “hard to reach”, so how do we do that? The real magic is in the approaches and values at Your Own Place, which is why we begin Train the Trainer by exploring them.
The Asset-Based Approach
Each person we meet in our workshops will already have experiences, connections, skills and knowledge – this is common sense, right? But how often does someone start to explain how to do something without checking, “What do you know already?”
At the heart of our activities is this core value: we’re not delivering knowledge, we’re providing a space for people to share, discuss, check and enhance what they know already. We ask open questions: “What do you already do to budget?”, “What experiences do you have of debt?” and “What do you know about your housing options?”
It shows trainees that we trust their perspective and value what they have to share.
The Restorative Approach
The Asset-Based approach goes hand-in-hand with the Restorative Approach. We work with trainees – rather than deciding what is best for them, we ask, “How will this work for you?” and “What are your priorities?”
We extend this “with” approach to participating in every activity ourselves – acknowledging where we overspend on weekly purchases, getting excited when we hear about a new budgeting app from trainees, and sharing our own experiences where it’s useful.
We don’t advise or tell people what to do. We provide the environment and pose the questions to create opportunities for discussion, for people to find strategies and support that work for them.
In Train the Trainer, there’s a fantastically fishy story exploring the Social Discipline window – taking the “teach a man to fish…” metaphor further. (You’ll have to book Train the Trainer to hear it!)
Our values
Alongside these approaches, our values are essential to our work and the way we reach people. We aim to keep our workshops high quality, accessible, and engaging, innovative and fun. We believe our approaches and values are the reasons 100% of trainees recommend our workshops – and a huge reason for 95% feeling more confident. (Statistics from 2023-24)
This is why we spend the time, in Train the Trainer, exploring these values and approaches in depth, and considering how we embed them. In the following days, we model the activities, with the approaches, so that before facilitating the activities, attendees experience them.
“We were able to put ourselves in the shoes of the people that would be doing the training – that was invaluable for us” – Cecile, Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney
After completing the four days – one day a week for four weeks – I arranged to visit the team at Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney to observe them delivering a workshop, to provide detailed, supportive feedback. I loved seeing the impact of the four days of Train the Trainer – attendees confidently planned, prepared and facilitated activities with companions who really enjoyed it!
“It built my confidence, I felt I’d learned enough, and with the resources that come with Train the Trainer, it’s just all there for you, it supports you through the whole thing” – Jo, Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney
If you’d like to find out more about Train the Trainer, our offer to train your team in the approaches and activities we use to support people’s confidence with money, employability, move on and tenancy sustainment, click here.
As Cecile from Emmaus Norfolk and Waveney says, “Don’t recreate the wheel – use this fantastic service and you will be embedding excellent approaches in your service.”
