“How does this feel different?” Brenda Salvati asked.
“I feel like it kind of invades my space,” Chardel Hastings said. “I feel trapped.”
“There’s nothing between us,” Salvati said. “We are removing all the stuff. We are really looking and focusing on each other.”
“There’s nothing to hide behind,” Joy Westervelt said.
“We get to know each other a little bit closer,” Salvati said. “It changes the dynamics a lot.”
What was different? The seating arrangement for the Drug Free Communities Program training session Thursday morning, held by the Allen County Multi-Agency Team.
ACMAT, a coalition of Allen County organizations, is providing free professional training sessions to coalition members and community partners as part of its goal of preventing and reducing youth substance abuse. The trainings are funded through a Drug Free Communities grant.
To register for a training session, go to www.surveymonkey.com/r/KXKZ3T2.
Thursday’s training session, the first of several planned over the next few months, focused on leadership development. Hastings, an administrator at the health department in Iola, and Westervelt, a retired social worker, were two of the training’s participants.
Salvati, the training facilitator and director of treatment and prevention services at Preferred Family Healthcare, said leaders should be aware of how the seating arrangement can play an important role in the way a meeting functions.
“The way things feel makes a difference on how you interact and how you work with other people,” Salvati said.
By simply moving to circular seating arrangement, the interaction among the training participants became more personal.
“THE SECRET is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other,” Salvati said.
“Community mobilization,” Salvati continued, “is about putting away the fingers and all of us ganging up on the problem.”
Westervelt said because of her experience working with senior citizens, she thinks they could be good people for work groups.
