Moving Beyond Icebreakers
An Innovative Approach to Group Facilitation, Learning and Action
Moving Beyond Icebreakers is a powerful tool to help you run highly effective meetings meetings in which everyone is engaged and the goals of the meeting are achieved. This beautifully illustrated 440-page book is packed with insights and ideas about how to make your meetings work. And it describes in detail over 300 interactive exercises (more than just icebreakers ) that enable you to:
Achieve Group Goals
Build Relationships
Resolve Group Problems
Teach, Lead, Motivate, Inspire
Available for Kindle
Praise for Moving Beyond Icebreakers
“Moving Beyond Icebreakers is a fun, enjoyable, and extremely valuable book for anyone who works with groups and wants those groups to reach their maximum potential.” — Alan Khazei, Founder and CEO Be The Change and Co-Founder, City Year
"I received the book Moving Beyond Icebreakers and facilitated my meeting based on the book's guidelines. It was overwhelmingly successful. The youth enjoyed it and the participation level increased immensely.” — Donna Marcelin-Samuel, President Positive Reactions Youth Group Trinidad, W.I.
“Nothing wastes the power and kills the will of the community more insidiously than endless deadly, unproductive meetings. This book raises expectations for what meetings should do and feel like, and then provides the means to fulfill them.” — Charles Deutsch, Senior Research Scientist Harvard School of Public Health
The Authors
Stanley Pollack began his career in the early 1970's working with juvenile offenders in Trenton, NJ. From 1973 to 1982, as a youth worker and later as director of the Mayor's Office of Youth Services in Somerville, MA, he developed innovative methods for engaging youth in a process of creating positive change in their communities — the basis for the current Teen Empowerment Model™. From 1982 to 1991, Mr. Pollack provided consultation in the model to more than 40 organizations, including City Year, the Food Project, Serve Houston, and the City of Boston.
In 1992, he founded the Center for Teen Empowerment in Boston's South End/Lower Roxbury, an area plagued by youth violence, gangs, and drugs. Neighborhood youth were hired to address these problems, forming a powerful group that forded a long-lasting peace agreement among warring factions. Teen Empowerment now has community-based sites in Boston and Somerville, MA and in Rochester, NY. Under Mr. Pollack's leadership, Teen Empowerment engaged over 30,000 people in social change initiatives and involved hundreds of school faculty, police officers, and youth workers in training designed to improve their agencies' ability to meet their goals.
Mary Fusoni has taught English and reading skills at the high school level in Boston and Arlington, MA, and was a founding teacher of the Full Circle School, an alternative high school program in Somerville, MA. She has been working as a writer, editor, and administrator since 1980, initially as a technical writer for computer manuals. In 1989 she began providing administrative support for programs working with the Teen Empowerment Model. She wrote the grant proposal that earned initial funding for the Center for Teen Empowerment, and was the Center's documentation and publications coordinator for 18 years.