My time here at HFLI has been an informative experience so far. Not only did I observe our young Latina Leaders grow over the course of their summer workshops held at the Ford Resource and Engagement Center in SW Detroit, I got to see the behind the scenes of how these workshops are put together.
As you can imagine, of course, there are a lot of different steps that take place before the delivery of a presentation or workshop. This includes meeting to discuss the flow of workshops to actually creating worksheets or presentations that will be used in the workshop. While getting prepared for an upcoming Detroit Financial Well-Being Innovation Challenge workshop, I had the opportunity to watch the behind the scenes of how things went.
The United Way for Southeastern Michigan’s Detroit Financial Well-Being Innovation Challenge provides seed funding and technical assistance to refine, test, pilot and scale Big Ideas to improve the financial lives of Detroiters. HFLI is the technical assistance provider for the multi-stage initiative and works closely with United Way leaders to develop and deliver human-centered design sessions and small-group coaching. At HFLI, this work is led by our Executive Director, Deborah Parizek, and Theodore Kozerski.
All of the sessions are conducted online. Debi and Theo met weekly, even two times a week if necessary, to ensure that the information that they were to present was in order and even created a detailed agenda that overall helped with the flow of how the workshop was going to go. Debi, Theo, and I met with program leaders to ensure that the flow of the agenda met both the standards of HFLI and United Way. I had an “aha” moment when I saw how detailed the agenda was, as I have seen agendas before, but not to the capacity that HFLI agendas are created. The agenda went into detail about what was to be shown, how long a topic was to be discussed, details about how a brief activity may go, information about the different breakrooms, and etc. However, I loved seeing the amount of detail and time spent creating agendas for workshops. This is usually the flow of how all HFLI workshops are created, from what I have seen. I saw how things had to change on the agenda, as something may not have worked or a certain section was unnecessary.
The unexpected will happen, but with a solid agenda that is well thought out, it makes it easier for the facilitation team to work together to make adjustments.
