Offering FREE Social Change 101 Workshops to Brisbane-based Organisations and Groups

Like many others, Covid-19 was a challenging time, especially for a fledgling social enterprise like us, and as the world begins to adjust to it’s “new normal” and open back up again, we’ve added a new offering, by offering pro-bono workshops to give back to the community and help them find inspiration and motivation to make a difference in our post-covid world. We developed our Social Change 101 tailored workshops as a quick refresher or overview of exactly what social change looks like, and how to bring it about, through our Theory of Change framework, so that changemakers working across different areas can hit the ground running with clarity and focus.

One group that we recently held a workshop for, was ReachAcross Brisbane. They are a nonprofit organisation that is focused on engaging and reaching out to youth from refugee and migrant backgrounds to assist with their transition to Australia. ReachAcross coordinated a workshop with HCN for a number of new community engagement and marketing volunteers who were new to the social change space and would benefit from a workshop introducing them to our framework for social change. The Social Change 101 workshop was tailored specifically for their work as an organisation assisting refugees and migrants, with the standard 5 X 10 minute activities that our introductory workshop includes.

These five activities covered:

1. How a framework for social change can benefit us as changemakers
2. Our framework for social change: how to distinguish between formal or informal change and individual/collective or systemic social change
3. Mapping out social change outcomes (specific to the organisation) within our framework for social change
4. Developing a theory of change for each participant
5. Q&A + tips and tools

The team at ReachAcross were the first to experience our signature Social Change 101 Workshop, and their feedback was greatly appreciated before officially launching the pro-bono workshops to a wider audience. For example, while the workshop was designed to be an introductory workshop for those new to the social change space, all participants expressed on their feedback form that out of introductory, intermediate, or advanced, they felt it was intermediate. This allowed us to tailor the workshop for two separate audiences: those who are new to social change work, and those with some experience.