Contact Us: Tel. 0113 3786958 | email. ccqm@leeds.gov.uk

Step 2 – Raising Awareness

Raising awareness helps to make the journey a shared vision.

Completing Step Two

In completing this step:

  • Everyone in your organisation should be aware that their organisation is interested in working towards the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark.
  • Everyone should understand that working on the CCQM is an individual commitment as well as an organisational one. You may make developing culturally responsive practice an appraisal target or another formal requirement. 
  • Everyone should be aware that the goal of the Quality Mark is to develop what we do, how we do it and who does it, and our management and governance is attentive to the cultures, backgrounds, and experiences of those we interact with and deliver to.

In large organisations it is not always easy to engage everyone in a vision, but it is possible…

Raising awareness of your commitment to the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark will highlight the importance of Cultural Cohesion and promote individual responsibility. It will also help your members to work together to achieve it.

Talking together: Building harmonious relationships through culturally responsive interactions is something that takes time. Much of the learning will happen through open and honest discussions

Use your current systems to encourage sign up. Let team leaders engage their teams and have your members add their pledges to your social media -tag us in @iCCQM.

Communicating change

  • There is no fixed best way to communicate and engage with people. What will work for you, may not work for another organisation. It all depends on the structures of communication that already exist and how effective these are
  • The main goal here is to ensure that all members in your organisation, your stakeholders, and all those who you interact with, understand the journey you are taking
  • Some organisations are better than others at communicating change. But here is one strategy that you could use to communicate your commitment to the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark.
  • Would this work for you?

Click for ideas you can use in your organisation:

Develop your end vision

We have provided the vision, but you can build on this further by developing your end vision that sets the social, psychological and moral imperative to fulfil this journey for your organisation. Personalise it to your organisation/community and consider what that picture would look like for you. [Button] See examples.

What’s In It For Me

Foster excitement, motivation, and engagement around the Quality Mark by articulating the WIFM (What’s In It For Me) factor. Let everyone know how they will benefit from embracing the vision of building harmonious relationships, where no one person feels isolated or misunderstood, and everyone has the real opportunity to succeed, without bias or inequalities and without marginalising anyone.

Reinforce the rewards

Explain and reinforce the rewards when the goals of the Quality Mark have been achieved, such as complete unity, harmony, greater understanding, greater opportunities for all, and self-fulfilment.

Share the journey

Share the journey you are embarking on frequently through staff meetings, outings, newsletters, emails, posters, social media and campaigns.

Develop visuals

Develop visuals, such as tables, charts and photos, which highlight aims of the Quality Mark based on the ones we supply online.

Align goals with the vision

Create and align organisational goals with the vision, and align individual and team goals with organisational goals.

Identify a team

Identify a cross-functional team that can anticipate the impact of the vision on the current workflow or current practice and that can devise new strategies and systems around the journey.

Communicate with stakeholders

Make time and create opportunities to communicate the venture with key players, key teams, and all stakeholders

Integrate your journey

Consider integrating this new journey at an event which exhibits what the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark has to offer.

Posters

Develop a series of posters to promote the journey in your organisation.

Provide information

Provide information about the Quality Mark in local & community newsletters, businesses, community boards.

Social Media

Use all forms of social media eg, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Web links, Websites and screen shots to attract interest to your new journey.

Advertise

Use places of worship, community centres, supplementary schools and homes to advertise and generate interest so that wider communities can see the benefits of being involved- with posters that you have developed.

Share with visitors

Enable visitors to your professional environment to read, glance or take away information about your journey towards securing harmonious communities for everyone, and what you as a group/organisation are doing to develop a respect, knowledge and understanding of our own and other’s ideas, customs, and social behaviours to ensure you are fully and appropriately responsive to them.

Live portfolio

Living evidence

One of the benefits of the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark is that as long as your organisation has a website or web presence in the form of social media there are no huge folders of evidence that we need to collect. Ensure that you upload your actions and signpost your members to them to evidence your efforts.

When you are ready for validation, we will look at your journey towards gaining the quality mark through your live posts on social media, photos, videos, online reports and policies, polls results and customer/client/member feedback, minutes of meetings, reported activities, news articles, presentations, charts and graphs, partnerships, evaluations and all other public evidence that is on your website.

Your web presence will be your online diary/portfolio of actions and progress towards increasing harmonious culturally competent relationships.

Even more useful tips:

Learning as part of the CCQM relies on communication and interactions

Importantly: Everyone can contribute! Thanks to social media, it is possible for more people than ever to engage, by posting their contributions through photos, messages, vlogs, etc.  Build a communication hive!

As you work through the three phases of the CCQM you can use the ideas below to:

  • build your online diary
  • collect and share your data
  • share your commitment
  • help everyone engage with and contribute to the tasks, and
  • celebrate your milestones

Art and Creativity

  • Photography: disposable cameras can be given to people of all ages to capture evidence of cultural responsiveness in an area. The results can be exhibited to generate further discussion or to promote additional events.
  • Vox Pox: short, snappy interviews with people in different locations and at different times (like radio or television). Like the photographs the results can be displayed and discussed more widely.
  • Songs, poems, artwork: invite people to submit (possibly for a prize) a song, poem or art piece which describes their area, changes they would like to see, to build a harmonious workplace or environment.
  • TV game shows: adopt and adapt popular TV game or quiz shows to generate interest and ideas, test local knowledge and/or understanding of CCQM action plans and tasks.

Strengths

  • Suitable for all age groups
  • Interactive and engaging
  • Enables participants to express their creativity
  • Can help develop a common vision
  • Can be exhibited to generate further discussion

Weaknesses

  • Participants’ confidence in their creative skills
  • Often a large space is required to exhibit or display results
  • It may be difficult to interpret participants’ ideas

Meetings

Open meetings provide an opportunity to consult large numbers of people. Meetings can be organised to allow for small group discussions with oral feedback. There are often opportunities for participants to set or influence the agenda and to ask questions. From our experience small groups are an essential element of public meeting to engage people effectively.

Strengths

  • Enables large numbers of people to have their say
  • Provides an opportunity to explain processes, give information and gather feedback
  • Demonstrates openness and transparency
  • Can attract publicity or be used as a launch event
  • Enables participants to develop networks

Weaknesses

  • Unlikely to be representative – not everyone has the time or inclination to attend
  • Attendance is often low unless people feel personally or deeply concerned
  • Some people are likely to be inhibited from speaking in a large group
  • Traditional formats can limit audience contribution and lead to conflict

Workshops and Focus Groups

Workshops and focus groups allow people to discuss their ideas in an open and relaxed atmosphere. Workshops can take a variety of formats. They can be designed to exchange information; to discuss the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a proposed action; to obtain ideas and innovative thinking for a way forward for the project; or they can be specifically geared towards prioritisation and the production of an action plan. Focus groups are designed to specifically concentrate on a single issue or a programme of topics.

Strengths

  • Encourages active discussion in a welcoming environment
  • Time and resource-efficient way of identifying and clarifying key issues
  • Conflict can be more easily handled in a small group
  • Can be designed for a specific purpose
  • Can be directly targeted at vulnerable or ‘hard to reach groups’.

Weaknesses

  • With small groups, it is difficult to be sure all stakeholders or interests are represented
  • Workshops can be dominated by articulate and confident individuals if not carefully facilitated
  • Requires experienced facilitators

Web-based Engagement

There are a variety of web based engagement processes to choose from such as online discussion forums and blogs, Facebook, online surveys, social networking, ratings and voting and digital interactive TV.

Web based activities enable people to choose where, when and for how long they want to participate.

Strengths

  • People can choose a convenient time and place to participate
  • Particularly useful for those who may be homebound e.g. carers, elderly people, parents with young children
  • Can create debate and exchange of views
  • Cost Effective
  • Can reach large numbers of people
  • Less time consuming than attending a workshop or public meeting

Weaknesses

  • Some techniques may require a moderator to manage comments, this can be expensive and time consuming
  • Excludes those without access to the internet
  • Needs to be publicised to generate interest
  • Some people may feel intimidated

Latest Tweets

Community Surveys

Questionnaire surveys can be undertaken to identify the needs and views of a large number of people in a standard format. The main stages involved are: defining the sample size and the type of information required; deciding on the type of survey to be used (postal, drop and collect, telephone or interview); survey design; piloting the survey; undertaking the survey and post-completion analysis of the results. It is often best to use a short and concise questionnaire where people’s views on an issue are being sought. Increasingly email and SMS (text) are being used to provide a variety of ways for people to engage. These work best when a small number of questions are used and when views on a specific proposal or issue are being sought.

Strengths

  • Can gain the views of a large number of people
  • Useful for obtaining quantitative data
  • In principle data can be compared over time or with results from elsewhere
  • Useful for identifying and evidencing need

Weaknesses

  • Need to be well designed and coded to get ‘usable’ answers
  • Large questionnaire surveys are time-consuming and labour intensive
  • Information may be limited
  • Do not offer any real sense of community engagement or provide an opportunity for people to exchange views
  • Typical response rates are between 10- 20%

Once you are confident that everyone knows you will be signing up for the CCQM journey, you can move on to Step Three and formally register:

  • Remember to build your online/social media diary while you are raising awareness.
  • Don’t forget to join us on Twitter so we can see how you are getting on @iCCQM
  • We may randomly ask people in your organisation if they know about your commitment to the Cultural Cohesion Quality Mark so that we know how good of a job you have done in engaging everyone.