MODULE 2 - Section 4
Preparing the Team
10 Minutes to complete section and related assignments
In this section, you will learn how to:
The importance of training an STT
Train leaders of STT
Introduction
Even though a team may be in your community short-term, they will be engaging with people, relationships and work that has been and will continue to happen long-term.
While we understand that the amount of preparation a short-term team engages doesn’t need to match that of a long-term worker, because they are involved in long-term dynamics they should be equipped with adapted long-term principles to support their short-term efforts. This is a core purpose for pre-community preparation.
Team Training
Every team that comes through our organization is required to engage in team training, which is the primary way to help a team prepare for their visit.
Between the resources of the Short-Term Teams Department and those of the goer-group, team training must cover the following 5 key components:
Spiritual preparation
Self-awareness
Team building
Cultural awareness
Understanding healthy poverty alleviation/community development principles
Presently, the STT Department provides a team-driven training schedule that strongly covers cultural awareness and poverty alleviation principles and moderately covers self-awareness and team building. The training schedule strongly recommends 5 team meetings at an every other week pace and includes self-study as well in prep for each meeting. The remainder of the 5 training components are the responsibility of the team to address.
A training schedule has been created and is available to teams that wish to utilize our training. Those who do not need to have a conversation with the STTs Director to ensure the training is covering the necessary components.
The attention paid to the team training is out of the STTs Department’s desire to ensure that short-term teams are ready to step into and support long-term transformation well.
Team Leadership Calls:
1. Pre-Community Preparation
This call is to help the leader create healthy expectations for the other team members, understand the nature of long-term transformation and how they can support it through short-term efforts,and consider how to take a group of individuals and move them toward a unified team.
2. On-Field Preparation
In this call, the attention shifts toward thinking about what it means to lead when everything goes “live,” from team dynamics to basic security and more.
The success of the short-term team is often driven by the health of a team leader’s leadership. To help the rest of the team member’s embrace the posture of being a teachable, flexible learner, we start with the team leader.
For most teams, a team leader will have two leadership coaching calls with the STTs Director.
These two leadership calls are in addition to the vetting/setting expectations call at the beginning of the process, and the debrief call that occurs when the short-term team is complete.
Host-Community Team Leader/Team Meetings
While the STTs Department will help prepare the team in a general sense, only you, the host-coordinator, have nuanced insights of what is happening in your community. You also know important information about how the team will engage while there.
While not required, it is highly recommended that you have at least one call with the team/team leader prior to the team’s arrival. On this call, it would be tremendously valuable for you to share why a team’s posture of listening and learning is important in your particular context and any specific planning details related to your community (i.e. project information, packing tips, arrival instructions, etc.).
Your connection also provides a meaningful connection before the team arrives and helps invest toward the long-term potential of the shared relationship.
You and the team leader can decide if you think it’d be better to connect one-on-one or have the entire team on the call(s) to benefit from the conversation.
Resourcing the Team
As part of the team preparation process, there are additional resources that are available to the team to help them engage well. Listed below are some of the most notable resources:
Community Guide
The Community Guide is distributed to the short-term team prior to their arrival and gives detailed insights specific to your community (i.e. culture, overview of the work being done, specific security items, and much more). In many ways, this resource provides a pre-orientation for the team to help them begin to understand more about your community.
You will create a Community Guide for your unique context in Section 6.
General Security Training
A thorough general security training has been created for visiting short-term teams, which includes a supplementary training section for secure communities.
While this resource is available, you will want to provide any community-specific security advisements to the team both in advance and then reiterate those again during orientation.
Fundraising & Prayer Team Guide
Many short-term teams will raise funds through their local networks. A resource on how to build a fundraising and prayer support team is available to the team to help them succeed fundraising.
General Packing List
A general packing list is provided of the common items that are helpful to pack for a short-term team. However, your community may have unique aspects to prepare for (i.e. weather, elevation, accommodations, food, walking, etc.). You are encouraged to create a community-specific packing list to share with the short-term team at least two weeks in advance before their arrival. This can be a part of the Community Guide you will create.
