In completing this step:
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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: