On December 2nd, during the December Mother Grove Meeting, we had our newly appointed Human Services Specialist in attendance to give us a review of what the Human Services Specialist will be doing, and what we as the Mother Grove can do and need to develop to provide safe places and risk assessment within ADF.
This training allows us to establish knowledge on how to better handle conflict as leaders and represent our organization in a way that is in the best interest of ADF.
Some topics included were:
- What behaviors create a higher level of risk for safety or violence
- Examples of what we’ve dealt with as leaders in ADF that we struggled coming up with a resolution for
- What scenarios do we deal with as an organization that provide opportunity for increased risk (such as festivals)
- What’s appropriate as leaders for us to speak publicly about on their own Facebook and how it can affect the org and what rights we have to still express our opinions on a personal level. I brought this topic up specifically because I wanted to relate it to my own personal experiences on being harassed for my own personal viewpoints being expressed on my Facebook. This helped me formulate decisions on how I would proceed with social media interactions as a MG leader in the future. Progress!
Some suggestions moving forward were:
- Create modules of training for leaders to effectively utilize
- Additional training for SD’s and Grove Organizers
- Continued training discussion that utilizes the HSS individual’s experience for training the MG.
HSS Discussion Recap of Goals and Discussion
- Building on existent policy and structure relating to complaint policy so we have things that are transparent
- Developing sessions on topics such as abuse and domestic violence, identifying signs and symptoms, how to respond to situations as they arrive, examples of how to step into those conversations. Powerpoint presentations that could go along with these sessions. Getting prevention information out there sooner than later is a good thing.
- Examples of complex situations that have arisen over time, we should create a better structured format to go over using those situations as an example. This way we can create something more concrete for guidance in the future.
- We have an existing harassment policy, we will build on what is existing to address some of the key areas like the challenge of creating safety at festivals, safety within groves, how do we look at creating safety in our inmate population and reintegration.
- Screening processes for grove leaders, senior leadership. Firm concrete decisions on expectations on who should have a background check and being transparent about it and communicate it well
