While your commanding presence and your ability to hold the room held all participants on course, you conscientiously (and consistently) created a safe place for us to have important conversations about exactly what we were struggling with. I was so impressed! You helped us maximize channels of communication so we could plan a successful major conference together. Those communication channels remain in place and continue to boost our productivity. Committees talk to each other, feed information back out to the network, and allow information and innovative ideas to bubble in. Staff save time managing extraneous communications and more innovations are incorporated into our work. Thank you!
Testimonials
“Naava was very open to listening to my challenges and struggles with evaluation and helped me work through it. After hours of back and forth, she helped me find the type of evaluation that would suit my program and understand the rationale for doing more consistent evaluation. She was very helpful working with a hard-headed CEO like myself and such consultants aren’t easy to find.”
Naava worked with me to develop a system-wide network strategy…As a result of our meetings, we revised the logic model for our networks across the agency, including refining our desired outcomes for networks…We planned for effective interactions with my supervisor and developed a regularized way to promote ongoing learning from practice among our cadre of network facilitators….She is an excellent listener who was able to help me reflect on issues and relationships and see new ways to move forward. She encourages action and also models desired strategies and behaviors through her own practices. She helped me solidify plans and action steps that I feel will open new pathways for my success in my new role.
I enjoyed the lunch session… It helped frame the other pedagogy sessions I went to/facilitated after in terms of collaboration and how I can work more purposefully with my colleagues.
Raised some important questions and things to think about.
I really like Naava’s presence–warm and inviting.
Rabbi Dan: Naava is a good listener and synthesizer and asks provocative questions. We valued the way Naava’s questions created a different perspective for us, so we could get outside of ourselves. Sometimes the perspective she brought was philosophical and helped us get beyond the mechanical mode of how to get the program done. There was value to having a person outside that we had to explain things to. It helped us think it through and explain it to ourselves.
Rabbi Tom: A useful trick that we learned was to ask “What goal do you want to accomplish” as opposed to “How do we get things done?” Then we planned starting at the end and met our goals.
Ellen Dietrick: Naava really listened to us and joined with us, understood our perspective and worked with us. A lot of pieces were new, including focusing on questions, the reflective component, evaluation afterwards. These gave us new frameworks and tools. We often “use her lines” e.g. Naava would say ..
“Thank you very much for being a masterful guide this year….Very helpful and will continue to be very useful.”
“Naava was a wonderful speaker and I hope to have the opportunity to participate in more of her seminars in the future. I thought the meeting was a huge success and I certainly feel much more prepared and excited to begin teaching.”
“Incredibly helpful — all learning teams changed dramatically in the last couple weeks. Now they own and drive the meeting.”
“Naava helped us design a format for the initial meeting that we used to introduce the concept of relationship-based peer learning. . . The Learning Teams, now entering their third year, consistently receive the highest ratings of any meeting segment. When the Learning Teams shared highlights from their year at our June meeting we learned that team members regularly contact each other between meetings for resources and information. Several also collaborated to sponsor joint training or service events this year. Without the benefit of Naava’s wisdom and expertise in shaping the Learning Teams, we would never have been able to achieve these results. Learning Teams have become an essential strategy for providing technical assistance and support to our grantees.”
“Naava’s pleasant manner seamlessly guided us toward a group focus. Many of us were surprised at what we had accomplished at the end of the day. Our evaluations, both formal and informal, have shown this was a very well received seminar. ‘Ownership’ has already become part of our common language.”