Capacity-Building Trainings

With nearly 18 years of experience in Technical Assistance and organizational capacity building, Samuel Lurie offers a number of capacity building workshops. He is also available for facilitation and consultation on specific organizational development issues, with a particular interest in helping organizations develop policy and organizational change around trans inclusion and access.

Training for Trainers: Skills, Techniques, Issues

A Training of Trainers, or TOT, is an intensive training designed to build skills and empower participants to present more effective, thoughtful and well-planned trainings. A TOT is a powerful group experience where a safe laboratory environment is created by the facilitator and group to allow for experimentation and all levels of experience and expertise. Since the need for transgender awareness training is so great, this TOT serves multiple needs-increasing the skills of participants; creating a network among participants for future referral; and helping to foster skilled training options in the community where the TOT takes place.

Can be delivered as highly intensive, multi-day training; or a shorter version, 3-6 hours in length for groups already somewhat familiar with training.

Training Goals: The Training for Trainers has two connected components:
  1. To understand issues of transgender people, their risks for HIV, and barriers and solutions to accessing adequate HIV prevention and treatment and other forms of care and support services.
  2. To develop training curricula and practice training techniques, utilizing Adult Learning Theory, needs assessments and proven curriculum elements to create an engaging, effective training.

Learning Objectives:

Back to Trainings

Developing Effective Programs for Transgender People

This workshop will discuss strategies for creating engaging and effective prevention and outreach programs for transgender people in participants' communities. By looking at numerous ways to garner input from transgender people themselves in the creation of programming, participants will also examine specific barriers in accessing services and begin to identify some strategies for addressing those barriers.

Learning Objectives:

Back to Trainings

Conducting Effective Focus Groups

This skills-building workshop will help participants gain an understanding of several methods for eliciting input from the community or target audience of proposed intervention programs. Use of focus groups, advisory panels, surveys, "town meetings" and other methods to involve the target audience in the programs designed to reach them will be discussed. This workshop will help build skills for getting the expert voices in our communities.

A basic premise of HIV prevention is to involve the voices of those you want to reach at all stages of program design and implementation. Effective facilitation methods are learnable skills that result in having focus groups and community forums provide essential information and guidance in developing programs that work. This workshop will help teach some of those skills and also allow for discussion of experiences and challenges workshop participants have had in conducting focus groups in their communities.

Through discussion, exercises and breaking down of the steps for conducting focus groups and analyzing their results, participants will be able to utilize the community/target audience expertise in their communities to design effective interventions and programs to meet those community needs--and to justify to funders how they used this information to design their interventions.

Learning Objectives:

Back to Trainings

Program Design, Implementation and Evaluation:

Successful program design is a combination of needs assessment, collaboration, use of resources, trained personnel, participant engagement and evaluation. This day-long training will address program development and implementation, identifying target audience, use of focus groups and advisory panels to develop goals and objectives; timelines, outreach, implementation and evaluation. Evaluation component will also include reporting and reassessment, or adjusting program elements based on successes and failures with the target audience and desired goals.

While funding will be addressed generally, this course will not focus on specific grant writing or fundraising skills. However, work done in this course should be directly applicable to fundraising applications.

Participants are asked to bring their project ideas to the session as we will have hands-on working group components in this training.

Back to Trainings

Other Capacity-Building Opportunities

  1. Group Facilitation, Board Development and Strategic Planning
  2. Consultation on other issues, which have included working with a youth services agency on making their shelter trans-accessible; helping a community health center design protocols for care for transgender people; assisting a Gay and Lesbian organization rewrite its mission to include transgender people, and others.
Back to Trainings

Presentations on Program Design and Organizational Capacity-Building