Preparation

So I went to the facilitator training last week for GA and I was nervous and excited at the same time.  I feel privileged that I have experience facilitating therapy groups or I would have felt really lost.  I will have to keep my middle-class mindset in check, because the investigators will not respond well to some white middle-class chick lecturing at them and what I tend to want to do is teach.  People in middle-class have an agenda and in this case my agenda would be for them to learn the content of the GA program/philosophy.  I have to trust the process and let them discover things for themselves, which is why the participants are referred to as investigators.  It's so similar to counseling... as a counselor I don't give advice, but I help people reach their own conclusions and develop their own insight.  

The program is based on Ruby Payne, Ph.D's work in uncovering hidden rules of class and I highly recommend reading her book A Framework For Understanding Poverty.  She defines poverty as the extent to which people go without resources.  And resources doesn't just mean money.  It's mental, spiritual, social, etc.  Each socio-economic status has a set of hidden rules.  For example, when it comes to food, people in poverty are concerned with quantity, middle class is concerned with quality and the wealthy are concerned about presentation.  

People in poverty think in the concrete as opposed to the abstract and are burdened with the "tyranny of the moment" meaning they tend to live crisis-to-crisis.  They have a concrete problem like the electricity being turned off, so they seek a concrete solution, like going to a payday lender to get money to get it turned back on.  Sure that crisis is resolved, but now they are paying back a loan at 400% which just starts a downward spiral.  Sometimes the middle-class sees someone in poverty with a nice TV or car and wonders "shouldn't they use that money to pay their bills or fix their car that's been broken down in the front yard for months?"  People in poverty don't get to take vacations, so having a possession like that serves as a vacation.  

The goal of the course is to increase awareness of resources and how to think on an abstract level - like planning, thinking ahead - as opposed to concrete thinking.  We accomplish the goal by using mental models, which is basically drawing a picture or a chart of what poverty looks like, what their resources are, etc. 

The investigators haven't been chosen yet, but they will go through an interview process with Tony from Mission 911.  I have a co-facilitator named Pam who is Tony's assistant.  We will facilitate 15-20 classes from the end of September until the end of November.