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The Across Borders Learning Programme shares its top tips for convening effective communities of practice to foster learning between organisations.
Since 2020, the Across Borders Learning Programme has sought to promote learning between 19 organisations and their partners to build a stronger refugee support sector. We have experimented with online and in-person events, 1-2-1 networking, collaborative advocacy initiatives, creative projects and warm, authentic relationship building. As this community of practice draws to a close, the cohort gathered in November 2024 for a final time to reflect on the conditions for success to foster connection and peer-to-peer learning. In this blog post, we share our 7 top tips for effective and energised communities of practice.
Across Borders’ 7 Top Tips
1. Define your goal: when bringing busy organisations together, it’s vital you establish the purpose. Co-create and communicate a long-term goal as well as shorter-term goals along the way. For instance, we produced our own internal Theory of Change for Across Borders to be clear on our intended outcomes as a community. Along the way, we made explicit the purpose of each initiative to create a sense of direction, always producing a concrete output where possible.
2. Create connections: the opportunity to make meaningful connections has been one of the standout impacts of Across Borders according to its members. Invest time into relationship building with creative event formats, such as meet and greets, world cafes and - in digital meetings - making the most of small group work in breakout rooms. As a coordinator of a learning programme, help connect the dots and put people in touch with each other to allow new partnerships and collaborations to flourish.
3. Bring a bit of love: showing up with a smile and your authentic self is absolutely essential! Use humour and lightheartedness to keep engagement high and avoid defining the success of a community of practice through hard metrics and cold data. The human connections and sense of safety and welcome in a community of peers is so much more important.
4. Be creative: a learning programme goes wrong when it’s based around reports and bog-standard presentations. Mix it up with peer-to-peer sessions, expert spotlights and creative performance, all the while making sure it’s interactive and learner-centric. Across Borders partnered with The Worldwide Tribe(opens in new window) to create podcasts and heard from stand-up comedians through Counterpoint Arts(opens in new window). When any one activity begins to feel repetitive or dull - shake it up! For example, in Across Borders, we used to collect feedback after each session through a Mentimeter form. When this began to feel stale, we simply stopped doing them, opting instead for more spontaneous approaches such as reflective check-out questions and 1-2-1 interviews.
5. Ensure everyone’s voice is heard: with many members, it can be hard to make sure everyone’s voice and expertise shines through. In Across Borders, we worked hard to ensure there was the time and space to hear from everyone. We made particular use of small group discussions in breakout rooms and always strived to be firm but fair in giving each person their time to speak. In our visual learning reports, we carefully balanced partner mentions and designed the programme in such a way as to suit various learning and engagement styles, from presentations in webinars to asynchronous collaboration through online documents. In Across Borders, we also took proactive measures to ensure engagement from people with lived experience of migration through paying contribution costs and making centring lived experience one of the programme’s key themes and operating principles.
6. Embrace co-design: it’s no good coming up with a rigid programme of learning and implementing it no matter what. Rather, the Across Borders programme was constantly re-designed in consultation with its members to serve their present needs. At times, we focused more on advocacy, digital skills, Monitoring and Evaluation, and lived experience. We paid close attention to the energy of the group, for instance by putting on additional sessions whe momentum was on our side. At least once a year, we took a step back, checked in with partners, hosting 1-2-1 conversations as well as group discussions. Co-design was also central to each initiative we put on, from our in-person Summit in Athens, to our webinars that were made possible thanks to many co-hosts from across the cohort.
7. Build your audience: a good learning programme supports individuals with their own professional development and ensures learning permeates beyond the community deeper into each participating organisation. To this end, open invitations to people across member organisations ensures the most relevant person from each organisation can participate in each session, according to its theme. Creating digestible public resources in the form of blogs, videos and podcasts also allows more people to benefit from the community's learning over time. For instance, we focused on creating Good Practice Stories and Videos for our Lived Experience Leadership event in July 2024, sharing insights with the wider sector.
Funded by Comic Relief, the Across Borders programme is a group of civil society organisations who are working to develop routes to safety for refugees. The 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. Explore more Across Borders outputs, including podcasts, exhibitions, reports and blog posts here(opens in new window).
