Conference Agenda

Target Audience

This workshop is for people seeking creative ways to involve local citizens in collaborative community-based approaches to health promotion in palliative and end of life care, including bereavement support.

Learning Objectives

Workshop participants will learn:

• a systematic and transferrable method for designing invitations to convene community groups that explicitly declare the aspirational intention of the convenor,

• a worked example of an invitation that is personalised to the participant’s context that they can take away and implement, and

• an enhanced understanding of how to describe the intended experience of the group memeber, as well as being transparent about what is expected of them.

An aim to spread the Compassionate Communities movement is for organisations and individuals to identify reciprocal benefits in forging new collaborative partnerships. The importance and potential of a well-crafted invitation to bring about intended collective action is often underestimated. The art of invitation involves so much more than communicating the basic details surrounding an event or occasion. It refers to a set of skills and practices to attract, inspire, and motivate people to coalesce on a mutually beneficial theme. The intended outcome of their collective action will be to generate positive change.

To spread the principles of public health palliative care requires involvement across diverse sectors of society. When convening community-based action learning groups - the invitation initiates the collaborative process. The invitation influences group size and membership, which can mediate the success of subsequent group activities. However, community organisers can feel unsure about how to take this first step. How can we increase our confidence that the people who turn up to a community meeting are the intended people we are hoping to engage and that they are clear on the expectations we have as convenors?

In the workshop, attendees will engage in a systematic yet creative method of inviting community participation and convening groups of likeminded people around a mutual theme of interest. The skills they will learn are transferrable to other activities linked to co-production. Each workshop participant will leave with a personalised example of an invitation they can use in their unique context.