Building skills in the Community 
A couple of weeks back, I mentioned the two big outcome areas that we’re focusing on over the next phase of the HCDExchange - one of them being “Increased organizational capacity to apply HCD + AYSRH.” We’ve basically realised that, despite not being a capacity-building or technical assistance body, we have a responsibility to the community to help work towards this need/desire that many members have of building skills and understanding of human-centred design. We just have to approach it in a community of practice-specific way.
So, what does this look like?
Well, we had to take a look at our limitations - we’re not a training body, we do have some HCD expertise in our team, but we don’t have a training curriculum. We also had to take a look at the opportunities and strengths that we have as a community - we have relationships with HCD agencies, a curated library of resources, and a keen and willing audience of people.
We have the unique ability to convene both the expert facilitators and the audience/participants. Hopefully this is a win/win/win, whereby:
- the HCD org gets to showcase their expertise and raise awareness about their work,
- the audience gets practical and hands-on experience with different HCD methods (and take-away resources!),
- we get to meet the needs of this growing community
We’re also trying as much as possible to gauge from our community what kinds of skills they are looking to build and also what kinds of learning formats work best. You might see us sending out polls and asks about this - please share your thoughts! It’s what makes for a community-led experience for all of us!
All of this being said, we’re super excited about the upcoming workshop on using HCD methods in AYSRH research, that’s going to be facilitated by Dalberg on June 29th.
I go into the specific thinking behind this first workshop of the year in this post - check it out and definitely sign up for the session!