Workshop III Summary

Summary of Third Community Workshop

29 July 2002

This workshop started us down the road to becoming effective leaders by training us in a basic PIA skill: the one-to-one interview. Diane Wakeham presented a faith reflection from Isaiah. Werner Goveya gave PIA's credential, discussing the effects of PIA on the lives of those involved. After a round of introductions where we all presented what we liked about PIA, the one-to-one training was provided by Elaine Lyford-Nojima, a PIA community organizer.

She started by presenting power as "the ability to act." Everyone can have power by investing in relationships with others. Thus we led into the basics of one-to-ones. A one-to-one is a 30-minute, intentional, focused conversation that achieves the following:

  1. It initiates or builds a relationship with another human being
  2. The interviewer learns about the self-interest (see below) of that person
  3. It offers an opportunity to invite others to become leaders or participants
In Jn 5:1-7 Jesus heals a man at a pool, but only after asking him, "Do you want to be well?" Jesus asks many obvious questions throughout the Gospels, from which we can infer two points: (1) He does not make assumptions about people, and (2) He seeks to enter into relationship with others. In this case Jesus determines the man's self-interest before healing him.

Our language generally divides people into two categories: selfish and selfless, with the implication that very few of us are selfless. But the "interest" in self-interest is derived from "inter" meaning "between or among" and "esse" meaning "being." Therefore, self-interest is defined in terms of relationships: "self being among others." It is what is important to us, and what we act on. Clarifying one's self-interest is a very useful exercise.

We can ask many questions to learn things about people, such as:

  • What do you like?
  • Where is your passion?
  • Why do you do what you do?
Two attitudes that are helpful to have when conducting one-to-ones are courage and curiousity. Both lend themselves to asking "Why" questions. Setup is typically a phone conversation where you
  • give a credential: PIA, purpose of organization, what PIA has done
  • purpose of one-to-one: to find out what issues are important to the community
  • "do you have time", setup a time
Outline of a One-to-One
  • credential: give background on PIA including aspects that you find exciting and that we are listening to people.
  • personal conversation: helps people feel more comfortable, builds the relationship and brings out issues.
  • questions to evoke concerns, issues, or visions of what they'd like to see done
  • next step: say something to the effect of, "can I stay in touch with you about this?" If they are excited about the issues they brought up they will probably be interested in hearing what is being done about those issues. 
	one-to-one Do's		one-to-one Don'ts
	Engage where they are	Judge
	Prepare (pray)		Talk too much (30% of conversation recommended)
	Share yourself		be a social worker
	Listen			be a fixer or solve their problems
It is important to take notes, mentally during the conversation and on a 3x5 index card afterwards. This is to prevent your mental notes from fading, and to allow the group to get a sense of what the community as a whole is interested in. Notes should include the name of the person, a phone number and/or e-mail address, and the issues they brought up. The 3x5 card prevents you from taking too many notes.

We ended with a prayer.