CDRA BIENNIAL –MCGREGOR-2009 

THEME-ORGARNISATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

PURPOSE: To create a space for development practitioners from all over the world to meet, learn and innovate together. It strives to add an emerging developmental discipline in the development sector-not from the perspective of theory but from experience of thinking practitioners.

The CDRA is always doing conferences like this one after each and every two years and they are always accommodating 100 practitioners but this year they only had about 58 people and their aim this year was to explore what it takes for organizations not to just allow, but enable creativity, both in their work, in the world and in themselves. 

When I first met people who were going to the Conference with me I was shocked and scared because they were older than me and it was my first time to be with such a group and a lot of questions were flying all over my head on how the whole week was going to be like with all these people and only to find out that most of them were youth friendly because I didn’t have a chance to interact with all of them.

The Approach that they were using was just the same as the one they using in the LL2 course that was in Cape Town last year using a lot of art work but here they brought different artist who were doing the following: A Dialogue with a lump of clay

: A Voice

: Building a picture

: Drawing from the heart

: Epiphany of the body

: Biennial Tango (Dance)

The artists helped us a lot because we had to be creative working in our practices and experiences and see what can work for our organizations. People were not doing the same thing where they were coming from, and again to me all the artists were good its only that we got a chance to work with only with one group but next time if they can create a space for everyone to engage in all these groups it could be useful.

They did a lot of exercises but there are two of them that I think they can work for some organizations in the network, the first one is called an OPEN SPACE

-To create a space for people to pursue burning issues

-Allow a space for people to have a voice

-Allow space for people to decide on what they think it’s important

A lot of people in Organizations are always afraid of saying what they think can benefit them in a way and with this exercise people can come up with different questions that concerns their work and those ones who didn’t have questions can join the others looking at whether they want to be helped with such a question and with that they can be free to discuss in their own groups and come up with solutions that maybe can help an organization in a way.

Some of the questions that were raised from the conference were;

i. how can Creativity heal broken and unhappy Organizations? 

ii. Would like to explore ways of organizations from perspective of beauty and how we can make that beauty inspire the world

The second one is more the same as the first one, it’s called the HOME GROUP, is whereby people meet in their group to discuss what they think is working well and where thy think they can improve, it can be almost every day or after each and every week, The home group exercise can be used again in workshops dividing people in groups and giving them different tasks about what has been discussed at the end of each and every day to go and discuss within themselves and it would be up to them whether they want to share to the whole group the following morning.

We also did journaling each and every morning and it can be good if we do that in our respective organizations so that people could not loose track of what they are always doing each and every day in their work.

There are different thoughts that were brought out by people in the conference like,

-We have to bring different people from outside who have different ideas that can help our organizations

-Communication plays a big role in why organizations break

-We have to make sure that communication is fixed

-Listen to each other properly

-We have to let things go

-We have to learn more about our organizations

-Create a safe environment for communication  

NEVER BE COMFORTABLE WITH WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN DOING OVER A PERIOD OF TIME, YOU HAVE TO QUESTION IT AT SOME TIME, BE CREATIVE

The conference was good and to me seeing that youths were not there was hurting because they are future leaders of tomorrow, they have to be exposed to such conferences so that they learn the best practices that they can use in their organizations and again to use the ideas to empower other youths in their communities.