Section 1: Facilitation (FAC) Tools
These reflective tools offer facilitators a means of deepening and enriching their support for community-led work. For facilitators, program officers, and managers alike, these tools can help to strengthen the “soft skills” of child protection work such as humility, deep listening and empathy, and advance their journey of reflective practice.
It is useful to engage with these tools before, during, and after the training workshop to prepare you for facilitation in a community-led approach. Extensive practice followed by reflection is needed in order to master the skills these tools seek to develop.
The tools may be used individually or in small groups. This section enables individual reflection by providing space for reflective writing, using a workbook format. Each tool in this section requires 60–90 minutes to complete.
On an ongoing basis, it is useful to think about which skills you need additional practice on, which challenges (internal or external) make it difficult for you to use a particular skill, and how you will take steps to improve. In small groups, you may want to reflect with three to five colleagues, with group discussion of the questions posed in these tools and of what can be done to deepen particular skills within your agency.
Below you will find all sections of the Toolkit for Supporting Community-Led Child Protection Processes, designed as a companion to the Guide.
Supporting community-led action requires a different skillset than you would need for top-down approaches. The tools here can help you begin the process of acquiring these skills.
The Toolkit consists of four sections, for each of the four major skillsets involved: facilitating, training, learning, and management. Click on any section to read more about that section.
- FAC 1. Humility
- FAC 2. What Do I Bring to the Community
- FAC 3. Deep Listening
- FAC 4. Empathy
- FAC 5. Developing a Reflective Practice
- FAC 6. Asking Probing Questions
- FAC 7. Enabling Inclusive Dialogue
- FAC 8. Understanding Power Dynamics in the Community
- FAC 9. Nonviolent Conflict Management
- TRN 1. Role Play-Limits of a Top-Down Approach
- TRN 2. Role Play-Facilitation as 'Facipulation'
- TRN 3. Differences Between Top-Down and Community-Led Approaches to Child Protection
- TRN 4. Gallery Walk and Discussion on “Community”
- TRN 5. Dos and Don’ts of a Community-led Approach
- TRN 6. Role-play for Asking Probing Questions
- TRN 7. Role-play (Fish Bowl) and Discussion: Building an Inclusive Community Process 1
- TRN 8. Role-play: Building an Inclusive Community Process 2
- TRN 9. Keeping One’s Boundaries
- TRN 10. Gallery Walk and Discussion on Community Ownership
- TRN 11. Sample Workshop Agenda for Initial Training of Facilitators
SECTION 3: LEARNING (LNG) TOOLS
- LNG 1. Learning Phase: Dos and Don’ts
- LNG 2. Sample Workshop Agenda for Training Data Collectors
- LNG 3. Ethnographic Principles
- LNG 4. Ethnographic Research Tools, Sierra Leone
- LNG 5. Feeding Back to Communities the Key Findings from the Learning Phase
SECTION 4: MANAGEMENT (MGM) TOOLS
- MGM 1. Questions for Reflection by Managers and Agencies
- MGM 2. The Sierra Leone Case Study: Community-led Child Protection and Bottom-Up System Strengthening
- MGM 3. Enabling Inter-community Collaboration: A Sierra Leone Example
- MGM 4. Phases, Objectives, Steps, and Benchmarks
- MGM 5. Qualities of Facilitators of a Community-led Approach
- MGM 6. Sample Action Criteria
- MGM 7. Sample Roles and Responsibilities of Mentors
- MGM 8. Thinking Through Facilitators’ Ethical Responsibilities
- MGM 9. Sample Initial Work Plan for Facilitators
- MGM 10: Sample Memorandum of Understanding Between Government Ministries, Non-governmental Organizations and Communities in Kongbora Chiefdom
- MGM 11. Sample Community-Developed Action Plan
- MGM 12. Sample Outline for Review Meeting
Vibrant community action that supports vulnerable children and also supports formal aspects of child protection systems is essential for the achievement of our collective goal of strengthening child protection systems.
Together with its companion Guide, A Guide for Supporting Community-Led Child Protection Processes, the Toolkit aims to enable effective, sustainable community-led action that prevents and responds to child protection risks. This community-led approach is promising because it generates high levels of community ownership, enables children’s leadership, and helps communities to mobilize themselves for internally guided, positive change.
Enabling community-led action requires a different skill set than is required for top-down approaches. The tools in this Toolkit begin the process of acquiring the skills needed to enable a community-led approach. It is suggested that users of the Guide and Toolkit go back and forth between the two, acting as optimal foragers in learning about how to interweave the principles and practicalities of community-led approaches.
The Toolkit consists of four sections, each of which includes notes to users:
Facilitation Tools: These reflective tools offer facilitators a means of deepening and enriching their support for community-led work. For facilitators, program officers, and managers alike, these tools can help to strengthen the “soft skills” of child protection work such as humility, deep listening and empathy, and advance their journey of reflective practice.
Training Tools: The participatory tools in this section may be used to prepare facilitators for enabling community-led work on child protection. Also, they are useful in training program officers and senior managers in one’s own agency on the value of community-led approaches. They have proven useful in workshops for NGOs, government agencies, and UN stakeholders that help to increase understanding of and support for community-led approaches.
Learning Tools: The learning tools help practitioners to learn about communities or collectives of people in a way that is deeper, richer, and more contextualized than is usually achieved in pre-packaged assessments and situation analyses.
Management Tools: These tools are not prescriptions, yet they give NGO managers and program officers as well as facilitators concrete examples of how to enable planning, action, and monitoring of community-led processes of child protection.
By design, these tools are not checklists or universal recipes. Each community is unique and operates in its own socio-cultural, historic, and political and economic context. Communities develop their own means of solving problems, and our aim should be to support them in this effort, not to straitjacket them by imposing one way of enabling community-led work.
The tools in this kit can enable NGOs, community-based organizations, community members, and others to help many different kinds of communities to develop their own, contextualized solutions, work in an inclusive manner, and unlock their own and children’s creative potential in addressing child protection issues.
The biggest challenge, however, in using these tools is that practitioners and agencies cannot simply take them “off the shelf” and use them with success. To use them effectively, we first have to reflect and change ourselves.
These reflective tools offer facilitators a means of deepening and enriching their support for community-led work. For facilitators, program officers, and managers alike, these tools can help to strengthen the “soft skills” of child protection work such as humility, deep listening and empathy, and advance their journey of reflective practice.
It is useful to engage with these tools before, during, and after the training workshop to prepare you for facilitation in a community-led approach. Extensive practice followed by reflection is needed in order to master the skills these tools seek to develop.
The tools may be used individually or in small groups. This section enables individual reflection by providing space for reflective writing, using a workbook format. Each tool in this section requires 60–90 minutes to complete.
On an ongoing basis, it is useful to think about which skills you need additional practice on, which challenges (internal or external) make it difficult for you to use a particular skill, and how you will take steps to improve. In small groups, you may want to reflect with three to five colleagues, with group discussion of the questions posed in these tools and of what can be done to deepen particular skills within your agency.
Humility is the foundation for effective work by outsiders who wish to enable a community-led process. This tool invites you to reflect on why we should be humble, on the nature and importance of humility, and how a lack of humility by facilitators or outsiders can impede a community-led approach.
To engage deeply with communities and develop a reflective practice, we first need to become aware of the host of assumptions, beliefs, knowledge, values, expectations, attitudes, and behaviors we carry with us, and how these shape the ways in which we engage with communities. This tool helps you think through what you bring and to reflect on the implications of this, using an example of a hypothetical child protection worker from another country.
Listening is key for communicating and developing relationships with other people. Yet in everyday life, good listening can be quite rare. Fortunately, we all have the capacity to learn how to listen in a deeper, more engaged manner, although this requires both effort and practice. This tool helps to stimulate reflection on good listening, its importance, and how to put it into practice.
Empathy is the ability “to walk a mile in another person's shoes.” Being able to empathize with someone requires that we be curious about another person’s perspective. This tool helps you learn how to put yourself in the other person’s position and understand fully how they see things, without judgement.
One of the most important skills of facilitation is that of critical thinking. This consists of two important processes: critical reflection and using what is learned through reflection to strengthen one’s practice. Find out why a good facilitator must continually step back and learn from their work, and apply these lessons to make improvements.
Probing questions are open-ended questions that invite the participant to provide additional information about what they have said or implied. These questions are among the most important tools for any facilitator, since they enable empathic learning about the participant’s views, values, and feelings in regard to a particular topic. Learn how to ask probing questions, which are essential to uncovering participants’ views about harms to children and the possible actions for addressing those harms.
Enabling inclusive dialogue is a complex process, and it may not come naturally to everyone. Yet with reflection and practice, anyone can learn this fundamental skill. In this tool, we first explore what “dialogue” means and why inclusive dialogue is essential in a community-led approach. Then we consider how to enable inclusive dialogue within our work.
The term “community” can suggest a homogeneous collective—a group of equal community members. Yet within each community lie significant differences of power and privilege. Learn how to identify these dynamics in community work, and how they influence the risks for children.
A key task of the facilitator is to enable constructive dialogue among many different community members for the purposes of collective planning and action, and to manage conflict so that it does not become destructive. This tool offers some suggestions for avoiding destructive conflict among many different community members when planning collective action.