On June 6 and 7, the fifth Common Good Lab seminar was held at the Polish-American Freedom Foundation Representative Office in Warsaw. It was attended by the most active representatives of PAFF Local Partnerships who keep doing their best to develop cross-sector cooperation in their communities.
The seminar was opened by Paweł Łukasiak, the President of Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland, and Kalina Grzeszuk-Zajączkowska, the Program Officer at the Polish-American Freedom Foundation. They spoke about current challenges faced in the process of joint creating the Program development strategy.
The opening lecture, with the intriguing title of Why Elephants Don’t Make Billboards, or Behavioral Economy in Practice, was given by Julia Kalczyńska of BLINK Spark a Change. She told about improving activities of an organization, so that it applied nonstandard and low-budget methods of introducing the desired change in social project participants.
The second day started with an open space workshop conducted by Aleksandra Chodasz, the “PAFF Local Partnerships” Program coach and instructor. The workshop focused on two issues – how to secure permanent cooperation of partners and maintain social engagement, and how to promote and popularize local community animation method for the benefit of common good. The animated discussion and group work led to many interesting conclusions and recommendations.
The next part of seminar was conducted by Tomasz Schimanek, an expert of Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland and aimed at joint defining the most important rules and conditions of good and effective cooperation in a cross-sector partnership. As a result, a number of factors that facilitate building the sense of co-responsibility of partners for common good were defined and the resources necessary for it were described.
The last bloc of the seminar was on a partnership communication and crises. The workshop was moderated by Sebastian Szajner, a business coach and a crisis intervention expert of SWPS University. The objective of the workshop was to look at the conflicts not as a danger but a chance for building social capital. The result of two-hour work was the list made by the workshop participants of actions helping to overcome the difficulties that was.
The Common Good Lab is a space for cooperation and experience sharing by the PAFF Local Partnerships alumni. It is aimed at development and popularization of local communities cooperation, popularization of local community animation for common good method, and enhancing sustainability of existing partnerships.
