Speaking
Toronto Community Development Institute
What Does Play Have to Do With It? Building Community Through Improvisation
The objective 
of the workshop is to give people the experience of how a playful, improvisational performance approach can build relationships, strengthen groups and build community.
We start with a series of improvisation exercises to get workshop participants comfortable performing and to build group spirit. The three facilitators do a “performed conversation” of their work in their different contexts. Using play and performance we help participants create improvisations about their community work. Building on these improvisations we will create one or more plays that incorporate all of the participant stories. There will be time at the end to discuss what we discovered in the performances. Who do you see participating in your workshop and in what way would it appeal to involved people in the community where you are engaged?
Improvisational performance is a unique participatory approach that is appropriate for scholars, practitioners and community members. Especially important is the way that the approach breaks down barriers and artificial boundaries between people of all classes, nationalities and ages while at the same time using and building with the differences. The presenters have used this approach with community members, agency staffs, educators and children. Performance appeals to everyone of all cultures because human beings are performers!
Performing the world
Youth Participatory Evaluation: As Serious Play
Within the non-profit sector the terms “evaluation”, “outcomes”, and “impacts” have become a part of our everyday conversations. However, what do these terms truly mean? And how can evaluation be conducted in such a way to inform our funders while continuously creating our programs and developing our participants? This session will examine these questions and will provide concrete hands-on examples of participatory evaluation drawn from Kim 
Sabo Flores’ new book Youth Participatory Evaluation. Both the evaluator (Kim Sabo Flores) and a program director will present their experiences of working on a participatory evaluation process that utilized playful methods. Together, they will argue that these types of participatory evaluation processes support individual, organizational, and community development.
Why is play important in evaluation? Play offers solutions for a number of challenges inherent in conducting evaluations. For many years evaluation has been understood as a practice conducted by “experts” or “scientists” or both. Even as the field has moved toward more participatory and inclusive practices that engage all stakeholders in the process, staff members and youth are often intimidated by the prospect of being involved in evaluation. Playing with evaluation concepts and methods helps to level the playing field so that staff members and youth can begin to see evaluation as something that everyone can and does do.
In addition, by using play in evaluation, it is possible to invite staff and youth to participate in creating evaluation methods and instruments that more appropriately reflect their work, both in content and process. The opportunity to engage in play is very rare in our normal schedules, but when we are given permission to play, it is amazing how freeing it is to our minds, bodies, and souls. To let go of the usual societal controls is both terrifying—we literally do not know what will happen next—and exhilarating—we come to new ways of thinking and understanding that are extremely beneficial when conducting evaluations that support program development.
Child Rights in Practice
Key Note: Child Rights in Practice: Tools for Social Change, Dunsmuir Lodge, Sidney, BC. International Institute for Child Rights and Development
The Child Rights in Practice training drew on ICRD’s developmental child rights approach that builds on the strengths that children, families, and communities and their unique cultures and an international network of colleagues working in child rights policy and programming. Over the five days we explored knowledge and tools that could be used to enhance practice and promote social change in support of child rights.
“Sabo’s focus is...on the concept of performances as developmental activity and a key kactor in youth participatory evaluation. This...extends the dimensions and boundaries to contributions to youth development itself. It may not be enough to engage program staff members and participants in the evaluation. It may be time to allow them to “perform in roles that seem to be far in advance of their own development,”...It may well be that this is where the real growth occurs and where the maximum potential for use lies, as people stretch and grow into their roles and “become who they were not.” (Fetterman 2003, pg. 88).