Interactive Workshop: Putting People First

During this interactive workshop, we will practically explore what it means to truly include a diversity of voices and remain open and neutral. Several relevant methods and tools will be also be presented, such as Sprockler (participatory narrative inquiry) and the People First Impact Method. You will learn from practitioners in the field and exchange and reflect with other participants on how people-centeredness applies to your own work.

In processes - whether in humanitarian projects, citizen engagement, or multi-stakeholder dialogue - we can often impose our own agenda, have pre-set ideas about group needs, or be extractive when getting information. Especially when involving vulnerable or marginalized groups of people it is vital to pay extra attention to work from a bottom-up approach and respond to people’s needs and ideas. It requires open conversations, neutrality, deep listening, asking the right questions, and receptivity amongst others. Both Perspectivity and ReflACTION have experience working in complex and often highly fragile settings, fostering dialogue among various stakeholder groups and including local communities and citizens. Both networks developed methods to be able to work more people-centered and support various organizations in doing the same. Therefore, we wanted to organize a session on this topic, not only to share how we work with stories but also to exchange and reflect with each other on people-centeredness in general.