THE THREE As: ANXIETY, AMBIVALENCE, ASPIRATION →
Attune
Reveal
Convene
Equip
Sustain

Guiding Principles

Equip

Provide your people with tools, resources, and guidance that sustains them and builds influence and efficacy. Create opportunities for learning, whether it’s labs, workshops, trainings, or toolkits. Then find out how well they’re working and what else they may need.

Be a gardener, grow your people.

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What does it mean to equip?

Many changemakers think we need to have all the answers and do all the heavy lifting. We don’t.

It’s true that many people look to us as subject matter experts. There’s nothing wrong with being seen that way. The more you can build the skills and capacities of others, the lighter your load gets, the stronger your organization becomes, and the more transformation you unleash in the world.

When you see and empower people as partners—not just supporters, followers, or members—you tap into vast motivational resources, enhance their capacity for lasting change, and build trust and loyalty for the long haul. People are hungry for tools and resources for supporting resilience.

Providing people with capacity building and skills gets us all where we really want and need to be: expressing our capacities to have agency, impact and influence for a better, healthier, sustainable world.

But, how exactly do we do this?

Your people have so many questions: How can we keep going? What do we do when we have to encounter difficult interactions? How can I convince my boss to impose a mindful flying practice? How can we practice self-care, when we know how much there is to lose? How can we manage our own feelings, which may at times go from rage to deep grief and sadness? How can I be more effective, more resilient? How can I cope?

The more we as organizations support people in their capacities to navigate these hard issues, the more they will relate to you as a partner, and trusted resource — and the more effective they can be in actively implementing, and leveraging, the desired impacts.

Here are five beginning steps to equipping your people
and watching them grow:

Provide your people with an array of top-notch trainings, tools, and lots of opportunities to learn. The more you provide them, the better their ability to address their specific concerns, build community, and increase capacity. Partner with those who have these tools and resources if you are not able to run this internally. Invite experts and skillsets that you may be missing.
What Best Equips You?

Becoming equipped means enabling ourselves and each other. This worksheet asks you, or you and a partner, to reflect on what best equips you.
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Individual Activity

Activities

Remember to convene. Create opportunities for people to connect between communities and within your organization. Provide peer-to-peer learning and sustain mentoring relationships that empower all stakeholders as they reach out, unleash their potential, and build capacity.
What Best Equips Your People?

Making sure your people are equipped for the work ahead means asking what enables them to do that work, this worksheet helps assess your stakeholders.
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Individual Activity

Paired Activity

Group Activity

Guides

Activities

Templates

When you provide people control over something they care about, they increase their investment as well as their abilities. When you build capabilities, enable people to run with their work, you amplify their contributions and give them more autonomy.

Have you heard of Learn, Do, Teach? It’s one of the most powerful ways of truly integrating new skills and knowledge. When people can start teaching we learn so much more. Everyone benefits.

Offering tools, resources and support for your stakeholders is a fundamental strategy we are 100% behind. Sharing your insights, knowledge and experience? Do this in a way that promotes relationships, interactivity, and keeping it real. Grow your community within a larger community.