A Showcase of Inspiring Social Justice initiatives

The Council on American Islamic Relations is a very successful organization that defends Muslim’s legal rights. As part of their charter, they are obligated to provide training to the community on how to defend their legal rights. This means that they routinely go out into the field and conduct training sessions on various topics.  In most cases, their attorneys are the presenters.

One afternoon, their Executive Director called me and explained that he was concerned about their ability to develop interesting and exciting training materials. He also explained that many of the topics would require a great deal of input from an attorney in order to translate the material into something that their clients would understand. He also complained that some of the training the attorneys had put together was boring and their presentation skills were not very exciting.

So the challenge was how could we work with this group of attorneys to produce world class training materials?

In order to facilitate this transformation, we developed a three-hour “best practice” instructional design workshop that incorporated the following components:

• How to use storyboards to construct the content in the flow of the workshop
• The essential steps of creating an engaging story.
• How to increase participant engagement.
• How to construct attractive and effective visual support slides.
• A checklist to ensure that the design conforms with the best practices.
• Creating leader notes for the facilitator.
• Best practices for delivering the material.
• Preparing for the dress rehearsal.

Our client was delighted with the fact that the attorneys were empowered to build their own materials and they were more effective in delivering their own training. We came in under budget and the presenters were able to immediately take these new workshops to various mosques across the state of Georgia.  This was a big success!