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The Across Borders Learning Programme shares its recipe for co-creating warm, engaging and reflective spaces.
👥 Serves: charities and organisations bringing groups of people together
🎚 Difficulty: easy
⏳ Total prep time: 4+ months
⏲️ Total cooking time: 1-3 days
🥣 Ingredients: a welcoming setting, local knowledge, human connection, clear purpose, co-creation, and your full self.
Description
Since 2020, the Across Borders Learning Programme has been experimenting with creative event formats to foster learning and collaboration within a cohort of international refugee organisations. Throughout, we have focused on creating spaces that are warm, engaging and deeply interpersonal.
Over 25 participatory webinars and workshops later, we brought together the wonderful Across Borders cohort for a beautiful, co-created, 3-day Summit in Athens, Greece. In this blog post, we share our recipe for engaging in-person events.
Method
1. Check the recipe: we invested weeks into understanding and narrowing down the scope of our Summit. We could have tackled a wide variety of topics, but instead we facilitated a series of progressive conversations to co-create a 3-point strategy for a refugee-led sector by 2030. We wanted a focused and directed few days resulting in a digestible, collective output.
2. Preheat the oven: conferences in gloomy hotel reception rooms don’t bring out our best. That is why we held the Across Borders Summit (note, intentionally not named ‘conference’!) in a gorgeous community-run library in Athens. This light, airy venue, that was also a socially-run non-profit, felt aligned with the conversations and people in the room. In the run-up, we shared photos, held pre-meets and connected people to create a sense of excitement.
3. Use local ingredients: we made sure our programme had space built in for local exploration and relaxation. We prepared group meals at local Greek tavernas, Afghan restaurants and project visits to local organisations conducted by local hosts. These allowed the discussions in our programmed sessions to marinade along with new ideas and local perspectives.
4. Give it a stir: we recognise that it is often what happens outside the programmed activities that brings most value. We designed our programme to leave space to take walks in the park and chat over coffee. Such moments of human connection helped foster a restorative atmosphere that facilitated our purposeful discussions and ensured longer-term engagement as we took the next steps as a cohort in the months after the Summit.
5. Too many cooks… don’t spoil the broth: the principles of co-creation and devolved facilitation were essential to our event. We avoided the typical ‘presenter-audience’ format in favour of small group discussions throughout. Inspired by creative facilitation methods(opens in new window), we trained up a team of co-facilitators to help guide conversations, animate us, and harvest insights so that we could hear from all voices. Since our Summit was also focused on building a refugee-led sector, it was also vital that refugee voices were at the heart of the Summit. In our case, this meant explicitly ensuring there was representation and additional support (eg. visas) for those who required it.
6. Chef’s tip: each time we start preparing an event, we ask ourselves “What’s our secret ingredient?” Often, the answer is personalisation: making sure we bring our warmth, energy and appreciation to the space. In Athens, we focused on ensuring every participant had their voice heard. As we bid goodbye, we also gifted everyone a hand-written postcard to say a big thank you to our guests who had given up their time and travelled from far and wide to lend their voices and expertise. And we really meant it: because food always tastes better when shared. Funded by Comic Relief, the Across Borders(opens in new window) programme(opens in new window) is a group of civil society organisations who are working to develop routes to safety for refugees. This cohort has been transforming lives together since 2020, and is set to continue its work until 2025. During this period, information-sharing, innovative practices and enhanced collaboration puts the Across Borders cohort at the cutting edge of a modern refugee response.
By Jacob Warn with Tanya Murphy - Comic Relief Across Borders Learning Coordinators
