Training for Practitioners

At the Heartland Center we "preach what we practice!" As community developers and practitioners ourselves, our staff and associates have walked in your shoes and talked to the people you work with every day. We have a number of training programs to help you do your job better and gain more personal satisfaction.

Some topics include:

Train-the-Trainer/Planning Effective Training Sessions

Teaches basic skills in group process, group facilitation and designing, and presenting training sessions. The session emphasizes adult education principles, and participants practice newly learned techniques.

Effective Presentations

Draws on the train-the-trainer research. A hands-on workshop to improve speaking and presentation skills. Applicable in both business and community settings.

Becoming a Better Facilitator

Assesses your facilitation competency and provides a variety of techniques to enhance your facilitator and co-facilitator skills.

Advanced Facilitation Skills

Need new skills for working with difficult issues? This training program can help you retool in the basics. Review five areas of facilitator competency. Work in a team to develop skills critical to facilitating groups. Complete a facilitator self-assessment, and learn a "language of group skills."

Energizing Entrepreneurship in Rural America

In this train-the-trainer program the Heartland Center describes different kinds of support a community can provide from within its own set of resources that encourage the development of local entrepreneurship and address "brain drain."

Measuring for Success

Need ideas for evaluating what works in your community? Measuring the success of your program is essential in today's competitive environment. Learn how to make the monitoring and evaluation process easier and more valuable. Develop creative thinking about outcomes, indicators and measurement. Discover ways to identify hard, quantitative data within "soft" programs. Explore how to use measurements for grant writing and marketing success, and learn to adapt successful models for your own project.

Appreciative Inquiry

Learn a new approach to success-based community development. This positive approach to revitalization is gaining worldwide recognition as a powerful tool for moving communities forward by examining past success. Investigate a new way of thinking about organizations and communities. Learn how to apply AI to planning, evaluation and coaching. Practice the steps: Define, Discover, Design and Deliver. Develop a plan for using AI in your practice.

Strengthening Social Capital

Move from reactive to proactive practice. Learn how social networking can become one of your community's greatest resources. Review the theory of social capital and its importance to community vitality, and learn how to gauge the level of social capital in your community. Discover new ways to revitalize clubs and associations, and take-home techniques for building reciprocity, networks and trust.

Diversity as Opportunity: Overcoming Community Polarization

America is becoming more racially and culturally diverse. Is your community tapping into the power of new people? Explore your own attitudes about "difference." Learn how diversity is a keystone to economic development. Discover ways to use your diverse population as a marketing tool, and share techniques for recruiting a diverse leadership group.

To learn more about training for practitioners, view our sample projects.