This is an excellent video (slideshare below) from Tim Davis, a consultant in Britain. He is one of the founders of UK Youth Workers Online site. It is a bit long (20 min.) but very worthwhile. I think the video is quite useful for youth workers who are struggling with how to address risk issues of youth participating in online social networking sites. Download the fullYouth-Work-and-Social-Networking-Final-Report

Brent Education, Research, networks

Isn’t this data exciting! Thanks Forrester Research for your great work. Now when I talk with non profit organizations about adopting social media strategies, I can use current data about what Canadian adults are doing online. More important, we can begin a conversation about the implications to their online communication strategy.

If the organization doesn’t have an online strategy, then the data can be a persuasive argument for developing a strategy. After all, if your donors, supporters, service users, staff, past and future stakeholders are engaged in online activities doesn’t it make sense to be were your constituents are?

An even greater challenge to organizations without a social media strategy is the rising number of Canadians that first judge a non profits online presence when they are considering making a donation. If the organization is not presenting any compelling social media options that engage them in their cause, those potential donors will move on – very quickly.

Brent Uncategorized

Non profit organizations and staff are by definition consummate researchers. It’s very important to keep abreast of new programs strategies to engage hard to serve populations.

Delicious is a social bookmarking tool that will let you create your own bookmarking list using your own taxonomy and you can share your your bookmarks by using tags. By sharing your list, you create a network that exponentially  expands your research capabilities. From chaos to order, Delicious is a must have for knowledge workers.

This short video will explain how to set up your account, what it does and why this social media tool can add to your research capabilities.

Brent Learning Community

The Community – School Roundtable was an event that brought over 80 people from very diverse organizations and sectors together. The Roundtable was organized by a group of school and community partners in York Region. It was an Open Space session in which you can choose your own topic to lead or select a topic that you wish to participate in. With the “rule of 2 feet” you can find another topic to participate in if you don’t find the session right for you. Here is how the workshop organizers framed the session.

Goals

The goals of the School Community Round Table are to bring our collective wisdom together to:

• Increase achievement and success for all our children and youth;
• Share perspectives on community engagement;
• Explore a different conversation about school/community relationships; and
• Discover new ways to strengthen our school/community relationships.

Our overarching question for the open space conversation is:

How can school and community partners work together over the next ten years to support children and youth in reaching their full potential?

I have 3 videos from the session. The first one is on this post. You can view the opening words of welcome from the Directors of Education from our respective York Region Boards of Education and an excerpt that shows a bit of the topic setting process.

I had a great time leading a discussion titled “changing the nature of the conversation for civic engagement”. I adopted the question format used in Peter Block’s community restoration approach to civic engagement. It was just a snippet from his model but it did prove to me that powerful results can come from powerful questions.

I like his approach because it frees up the participants to think of what’s possible instead of what do we have to fix and going down that problem solving road. The people in my group shared some very personal and insightful comments about what is community and what is civic engagement.

Brent Learning Community, networks openspace roundtable