What Makes Us Unique
We use the wilderness as both classroom and teacher.
The wilderness has a way of opening up your soul and of making you vulnerable. More often than not, this allows for healing and a deepening of your own spirituality.
During a wilderness course, we offer various opportunities to go off and be on your own, quieten down, look around, appreciate the beauty, and reflect. This time out, called ‘solo time’, offers people an opportunity to become more aware of their own being,of themselves in relation to the world, their values, hopes and dreams, and to renew their sense of purpose and life direction.
Educo Africa - A Learning Organisation
To ensure that Educo Africa (with its essence intact) remains relevant to the need in our society, we keep our fingers on the pulse of our practice. We have identified all our rhythmic or regular opportunities for learning including team debriefs after courses, individual reviews and staff meetings. We have given them high calendar priority.
One day every month is set aside for Reflection and one day every quarter for Staff Care. This is to create space, away from the office, for review and sharing of our practice, and to shift gears in favour of nurturance and greater balance.
These sessions have been used for
- Individual check-in and team learning
- Using case studies and storytelling as reflective tools
- Dialogue to help push the edges of our understanding
- Practising facilitation and testing developmental tools
- Bringing back learning from seminars, conferences; and as a teaching space
- Specific review of strategy and vision
- Showing up system cracks, as we challenge and work our way through complicated issues.
Then there are Monday morning staff meetings, which focus more on detail, critical items, as well as stories from the field, acknowledgments and celebrations, and a wellbeing pulse-check.
Our annual rhythm includes Staff Retreat and Strategic Planning sessions. The Retreat is a time-away for the whole team at the start of each year, to consolidate and energise for the work ahead. This is followed by detailed planning for the year.
Strategic planning always involves all staff, programme and admin together. The underlying belief is that each person’s viewpoint and input has value, and buy-in results from full participation in discovering and designing the way forward. Careful attention is given to the meshing of individual vision with organizational vision. The closer the alignment, the happier the staff and the healthier the organisation.