Why start a Regional Meet-up?

CSEC is a great partner for faith communities and individuals working with Strengths and Engagement, however sometimes it is better to be able to discuss face-to-face with others who are working in the vineyard just like your organization, many of whom may be facing the same issues.

We found this to be the case in the Minneapolis region and our answer was to create CSEC-MSP, a regional meet-up, and its purpose is to bring strengths champions together for quarterly discussion about all things Strengths and Engagement.

CSEC-MSP has been meeting since 2017 on a quarterly basis. At each meeting, we have welcomed anywhere from 6 to a dozen strengths champions to discuss topics, share best practices, and support each other’s strengths and engagement programs.

We started by sending out an informational flyer to all the faith communities that we knew had offered Living Your Strengths programs and asked if they saw their community in any of the following:

We have heard about CliftonStrengths® (StrengthsFinder®) and its use in faith communities–we want to know if this would be a good fit for our faith community.
We have started a Living Your Strengths program...now how can we grow this program?
We had a Living Your Strengths/Strengths Quest program and it seems to have fizzled, how do we breathe some life into our program?
We aren’t connected or comfortable online, can we just meet to discuss?

We also shared other benefits to joining in this charter group:

Learn what other faith communities are doing with their Strengths program
Share Ideas
Get answers to your questions from others in the Strengths Community
Discuss best practices
Get access to resources that have been used successfully by other churches

We have covered all sorts of topics, including:

Engagement
Starting a Living Your Strengths program
Facilitator 101
Balconies and Basements
Strengths Domains
How to get Gallup certified as a facilitator

And we have shared resources, figured out new tactics, explored best practices, and received great support from one another as we built our own community – CSEC-MSP.

If you would like to start your own regional meet-up and have questions, feel free to contact CSEC Board members, Martha Buelt, mbuelt@talentstrength.net or Mary Kennedy, mkennedy@saintolaf.org.