There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a group when someone reads a reflection card aloud and nobody rushes to answer. It’s not an awkward silence — it’s a working one. Somewhere in the pause, assumptions are being noticed.
Practice Circles bring practitioners together each month to explore one stage of the Power to Praxis Cycle. People arrive from different organisations, countries and roles — a WASH engineer in Suva, a program manager in Melbourne, a community organiser in Manila — carrying projects that rarely unfold as planned.
Why reflect together?
Reflection on our own tends to confirm what we already believe. Reflection in community does something different: someone else’s question unsettles our certainty, someone else’s experience names a pattern we couldn’t see from inside our own project.
In a recent circle, a single card — What assumptions about community needs guide this design? — carried the whole ninety minutes. One participant realised the “community priority” in her project documents traced back to a donor scoping mission from years earlier. Naming that out loud changed what she could do next.
Reflection that leads somewhere
Every circle ends the same way: each person names one small, concrete commitment — a conversation to have, a decision to revisit, a question to bring to their team. Reflection connects to action, or it stays an exercise.
Practice Circles are open to anyone building more participatory, accountable and community-led projects. You’ll find the upcoming dates on the What’s On page.
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