News & Events Français | Help | Contact Us

This is an archive of CharityVillage NewsWeek. To find a word on the page, use your browser's "find" feature (CTRL-F or CMD-F).
To view other articles in the archive, use our Chronological Index.

Please note: While we ensure that all links and e-mail addresses are accurate at their publishing date, the quick-changing nature of the web means that some links to other web sites and e-mail addresses may no longer be accurate.

David Sax and interactive learning for nonprofits

By Nicole Zummach
March 26, 2007

REGINA, SK // Our mothers used to warn us that it's all fun and games until someone loses...something. That 'something' usually depended on how much she wanted to deter us from our current activity. David Sax has a different theory: that fun and games will lead not to loss, but to gain - particularly a gain of knowledge and understanding. In his role as executive director of the Catholic Family Services Society of Regina, Sax has conducted his fair share of board orientation and staff training sessions, always working hard to impart important information about the structure and operations of his organization. But it wasn't until he adopted a more playful approach that people really got engaged in the learning process.

Sax was selected as a Muttart Fellow in 2005 based on his proposal to develop an interactive learning experience for nonprofits. He believed that people would retain more information if their learning wasn't restricted to lectures and handouts. So, he spent his sabbatical year creating a new way to teach people about the inner workings of a nonprofit organization. CharityVillage spoke with Sax about the outcome of his project, the feedback he's receiving, and his advice for other agencies.

CharityVillage: You worked on a very interesting project during your year as a Muttart Fellow. It's been described as an interactive learning experience for nonprofits. What exactly are we talking about?

David Sax: The concept is to use a game in order to achieve a certain awareness of the issues, needs, and struggles of a not-for-profit organization. It's actually a board game that incorporates multiple levels of learning. You want to try and create an opportunity for people to be engaged in multiple accessing points. So the first level is incidental learning, and that incidental learning happens just by seeing and reading something. For example, the shape of the game board is a pentagram - a five-armed star - with each arm representing a subsystem within an organization. The five subsystems are governance, leadership and management, service delivery, your community network, and your relationship with funders and stakeholders. One team is responsible for each subsystem. So the game is about one organization; it's a noncompetitive game. Just by reading things aloud [as they move around the board], people are learning what goes on in an organization. That is the incidental learning.

Secondly, there is the conceptual learning, which is a little more abstract. The object of the game is to traverse your [game] year making decisions and generating capital. You must generate three types of capital: monetary capital to run things and pay the bills; social capital, which in some respects is the good will and confidence that is generated internally within the organization and externally with your networks; and expertise capital - expertise within the realm of your board of directors, your CEO, and your staff to get the job done.

Thirdly, you have the didactic learning - the learning that comes from talking about issues and struggles and decision-making. The game includes cards with situations that could arise; all of the situations are ones I've collected from people in various organizations. The idea of the game is that you have these dilemmas and you need to decide what to do. You have to decide whether to deal with it as a subsystem or open it up to the whole organization. So you have these interesting conversations about the dilemmas and you are doing a fair bit of brainstorming.

CV: What prompted the idea to develop a board game for nonprofits?

DS: It was an interesting experience. I don't think as a child I particularly grooved on board games. But what happened was that Family Service Canada sponsors a gathering for executive directors each year. We brought in a sociologist named Charles Petranek, from the University of Southern Indiana. Charles has used gaming as a key educational tool for many, many years. And simulation and gaming are much bigger than what we think of as entertainment board games or video games. Charles introduced us to the idea that you could create experiential learning in a very fun format. It's a very effective tool because as people play such games they gain insights that they do not gain just by reading materials or being talked to. The experience of them making choices and talking about those choices is really a powerful way of solidifying new information.

I had this aha experience. I'd been banging my head about board orientation. I guess I must have done some sort of board orientation two months before, and it was the typical 'flog them with paper' thing and trying to get them to understand something. My experience over the years is that it takes about three years for a board member to really understand the organization, what we do, how it is paid for, and what the bigger picture is. It just takes a long time. Because they are not there that often, and they are not involved in many of the day-to-day activities, they do not understand the complexities of many of the issues. So I said to myself, 'I could create a game for a board orientation about running a nonprofit organization.' That's where it came from...an instantaneous flash.

CV: What is happening with the project now that your year as a Muttart Fellow has ended?

DS: What I did was produce a game board, plus all of the instructions and cards and the game process, such as how you make and lose capital and what you do at the end of the game and that sort of thing. I had the game board photographed, saved in TIFF files and burned onto CDs. So literally the whole project is on two discs. My suggestion to the Muttart Foundation was not to make kits, but to make CDs. For $10 dollars you can send this to anyone and they can make their own board as long as they have a colour printer and MS Publisher.

CV: Have you been using the game within your own organization?

DS: Oh yes. We did a staff development day so we took a couple of hours out to play the game. I've done it once for Family Service Canada at their national conference in Winnipeg, and at another national gathering in February. Apparently, some people have contacted the Muttart Foundation about it, but they are not exactly sure what they are doing with it yet. It's supposed to be up to them as to what they do with it. Among people here, they call me up and say, 'bring the game over', so I bring the original over and we play.

CV: You're obviously getting positive feedback about it then?

DS: Yes, the feedback has been very gratifying. People find it fun. They are always very surprised at the complexity of what goes on. They say, 'I've lived this.' One of the things that happens when you get people playing this game is that the noise level in the room goes up immensely. There is a lot of laughing, a lot of pounding on the table. It's fun because it's not serious and people can play with the ideas, be silly, be creative. People almost always say they got some new ideas out of it. As far as I'm concerned, if they had fun, if they related to it, and they got some ideas, those are my goals.

CV: Given your years of experience in the nonprofit sector and your work on this game, what advice would you give to organizations looking to address the real-life challenges that inevitably arise?

DS: I think the best thing an organization can do is to reach out to like-minded organizations and learn from each other. That's how the game came about, and to tell you the truth, I think that has been my greatest asset - my confrères in other organizations who are willing to share their highs and lows, and the things that work and don't work. That strengthens my experience as an executive director and the organization I run.

David Sax is the executive director of the Catholic Family Services Society of Regina. He was the senior counsellor/therapist at the agency from 1983 to 1991, and 1996 to present.

To learn more about the Muttart Fellowship program, visit: www.muttart.org/fellowsprogram.htm.

About CharityVillage  |  Free Newsletter  |  Media Centre  |  Contact Us    Terms and Conditions of Use  |  Privacy Policy    © CharityVillage Ltd.  All rights reserved.