Habi conducted a 2-day co-design workshop with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines ESD Unit to assist them in setting their team strategies for 2022. The first day focused on the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Unit’s purpose and identity and included visioning and brainstorming exercises with representatives of other WWFP units.
The second day focused on people and experiences, and included unpacking the ESD Unit’s impact statement and mapping its theory of change. The debrief session provided a space to discuss the ESD unit’s realizations and key takeaways from the 2 workshops. The ESD Unit emerged from the engagement with action steps to prioritize for 2022.
Task
How might we create a participatory space for developing the ESD Unit’s strategy?
Growing into Long-term Relationships
Habi and the ESD Unit of WWFP have previously worked together on a Habi Hour episode entitled “Kuwentuhang Kalikasan” and through some public Habi workshops attended by ESD Unit members. This allowed us to come into the partnership already with rapport and a good working relationship, but it was still relevant to understand their team’s needs and current situation especially since a lot of their work, like the rest of the world, was redefined by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Designing Human-Centered Workshops
In an effort to make the co-design workshops participatory and responsive to the ESD Unit’s needs, pre-workshop discussions were held with the ESD Unit. They did initial exercises related to their favorite ESD projects, and their strengths, challenges and opportunities as a unit. The Habi team used these inputs to design the workshops.
Something as simple as selecting the digital platform and tools to be used in the workshop considered the interests of the ESD Unit and other representatives of the WWFP team. Prior to the workshop, the Habi team did a survey that checked on the familiarity of the participants with Miro, our preferred tool for collaboration. While several expressed that they were not familiar with it, they mentioned that they are interested to learn it. As designers, this was an opportunity for us to not only to achieve the workshop objectives, but to introduce new ways of working that the participants might find useful in their own work.
Empowering Workshop Participants to Co-Design
Co-design workshops, unlike more structured trainings with fixed outputs and predictable schedules, afford the participants flexibility and power to steer sessions to a direction that works for them. Pre-workshop discussions and activities informed the design of the first session. Witnessing the participants passionately talk about ways to evolve the ESD Unit’s ways of working and initiatives informed the design of the second session; allowing participants more time to talk about these seed ideas or, as we say in Habi, pagpapadaloy ng mga ideya (letting ideas flow). The debrief meeting was specifically designed to ensure that the ESD Unit emerges from the engagement feeling empowered and inspired to carry out plans and ideas formulated in the workshop. Among their final outputs was “The ESD Recipe for Programs” which now provides the ESD Unit with a core framework to apply as they design learning experiences, projects, and initiatives for 2022 and beyond.
