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The ‘Heroic Journey’ framework is a resource that is being co-developed by designers and community organisers to enable active citizen participation in public life.
Based on the archetypal structure of the Hero’s Journey storytelling monomyth by Joseph Campbell, the framework aims to help users to explore and align personal values with the future development of their community. it allows the embedding of vernacular goals and meanings in project-making – i.e. increasing leadership, participation and co-creation that is meaningful at a personal level and connects with other stakeholder’s priorities. Users learn design and community organising approaches that can develop their creative leadership capacity, empowering wider and more diverse engagement in the socio-political sphere.
In a nutshell,
- The resource kit is inspired on ‘The Hero’s Journey’ storytelling metaphor.
- Participants work as a group, following a sprint structure and self-organise the R&D tasks and meetings themselves
- Project plan/journey will be outlined in Miro digital board
- Project team moderates the process via WhatsApp
- The group catches up via online workshops to present and get feedback from the project team
- To harness the experience, participants keep a reflective diary, with prompts shared via WhatsApp and documented on Padlet and Loom
We launch the challenge in response to enable young people to participate in community decision-making, especially in communities severely limiting their representation in the policies developed at local level.
The objective is to co-create their ‘Heroic Journey’ of self and community transformation, by creating a set of visual and digital resources that enable them to act and progress their stories. The resource can be used to help young people to discover and align their personal values with the future development of their communities.
We will work together, combine methods from service design and community organising and learn from each other’s practices, while creating a useful resource to enable young people’s wider participation in public life.
Participants will learn how service design can be used to develop strategic leadership capacity for activating change in the socio-political sphere.
One key area for social change is to empower citizens to activate change that disrupts built-in systemic inequalities and exploitative practices.
Although we are developing this resource for young people, we envision it to be adaptable for different uses – i.e. increasing leadership, participation and co-creation that is meaningful at personal level, and also connects to other stakeholder’s priorities, for example, NGOs and local government citizen and Sustainability Strategies.
Workshops
Structure.
Wednesday, 18th November
Workshop 1
Briefing
18:00 – 19:30
Welcome to the Climate Action Heroes!
We kick off the journey with the first workshop on the challenge of developing a toolkit to build leadership capacity.
In this space we look at the briefing in more detail and participants to dive into the briefing, find their roles, allocate tasks for the following sprints. You will also be guided towards resources like the Hero Journey model and approaches to tackle the challenge in sprints.
Workshop on Zoom!
Friday, 27th November
Workshop 2
Model Review
18:00 – 19:30
Half way through the project we catch up and review the first ideas!
This workshop follows the first research and synthesis sprints and you will have collaboratively brought first ideas into being.
We will review the first models of a leadership toolkit, and create the space for your to share your individual learning on the topic of Creative Leadership development.
Workshop on Zoom!
Friday, 11th December
Workshop 3
Prototype Review
18:00 – 19:30
With the feedback and reflection from workshops and sprints we invite you back to share and review your prototype.
In this closing workshop you will present your results as the initial feedback you have gathered along the way. The final version will then be presented as an initial toolkit and tested within communities in East London.
To close the journey you will be given the chance to reflect on your collaboration, sprint experience and personal learnings.
Workshop and closing celebration on Zoom!