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Leadership Training Resources
*Note: This page is a private page and not accessible through the PHA Canada website menu listing.
These are some of the resources and tools that PHA Canada has identified to help increase your confidence, knowledge, and skills so you can actively contribute, grow, and enjoy your volunteer work with PHA Canada!
Some of the resources listed here have been or will be used as part of PHA Canada’s Leadership Training Program. Others are offered here to review and use for your skill development. PHA Canada does not require volunteers to be familiar with all of these resources. We support you in identifying your interests and areas for skill development and to let us know of additional resources you find useful.
One of our goals is to support your self-directed learning and to help you develop mentoring and training skills so that you can support other volunteers in the future.
These are some of the resources and tools that PHA Canada has identified to help increase your confidence, knowledge, and skills so you can actively contribute, grow, and enjoy your volunteer work with PHA Canada!
Some of the resources listed here have been or will be used as part of PHA Canada’s Leadership Training Program. Others are offered here to review and use for your skill development. PHA Canada does not require volunteers to be familiar with all of these resources. We support you in identifying your interests and areas for skill development and to let us know of additional resources you find useful.
One of our goals is to support your self-directed learning and to help you develop mentoring and training skills so that you can support other volunteers in the future.
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Individual Learning Tracking Sheet – This short checklist lists the four areas of skill development identified in the 2023 Ambassador Leadership Development Plan – Personal Skills & Communications, Storytelling, Advocacy, and Understanding the Principles of Patient-Oriented Research. The checklist identifies resources available to help with skills development and includes columns to plan times for this work and evaluate lessons learned.
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Interpersonal Skills Inventory - A checklist of communications, relationship-building, presentation, and emotional and personal awareness skills that volunteers can use to identify where they might have advanced skills and areas they want to develop. Adapted from Leadership from the Heart: A Guide for Cancer Self-help Groups, by Pat Kelly; Key Porter Books (p. 34-36).
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Developing Group Facilitation Skills - One of the most important sets of skills for leaders and volunteers is facilitation skills. We use these "process" skills to guide and direct key parts of our organizing work with groups of people, such as planning and running meetings/sessions and training/mentoring others. This resource explains the different skills involved in facilitation with examples to understand the process better. The page also provides a checklist and tools.
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Developing Peer Support Skills - Peer support is emotional and practical support between two people who share a common experience, such as a mental health challenge or illness. A “peer supporter” has lived through a similar experience and is trained to support others. Peer Support Canada helps define Peer Support and provides resources and training programs.
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Centre for Excellence in Peer Support - Offers peer support training created and provided by an experienced peer worker based on successful models of peer support developed for mental health and addictions.
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Peer Support Toolkit for People Living with HIV and/or Hepatitis C - This excellent toolkit provides practical guidance and tools to assist community-based organizations or groups in delivering social and emotional peer support services to people living with HIV and/or hepatitis C (Hep C) and can be adapted for use for any peer support program.
Interpersonal Skills Development & Communications
You already know how important your personal story is to educating and supporting others. Your personal story makes your issue come to life when communicating with others, whether it’s a researcher, clinician, member of the media or public, or decision maker. It makes your issue real for the listener and provides a point of connection between the two of you. Your personal story fuels the logic of your “ask.” You know it needs to be emotional and motivating, clear and concise. The following resources are offered to help volunteers craft their stories for different audiences.
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Bearing Witness to Lived Experience Workbook – This document is organized into three parts. The first part is geared toward the person (e.g., patient or caregiver) who is sharing their story. The second part is geared toward group facilitators to guide them on how best to support the person sharing their story and the people receiving the story. The third part includes additional resources on trauma-informed practices, storytelling, and a self-care example template that can be provided to people when sharing and receiving stories. Adapted by Lisa Hawthornthwaite for PHA Canada’s Ambassador Storytelling Workshop, May 1, 2023 – Shared with permission from the Ontario Health Team Patient, Caregiver & Community Engagement Learning Working Group.
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Ambassador Storytelling Workshop, May 1, 2023, Toolkit for Writing Your Own Story - This toolkit will be helpful to volunteers who are writing about their PH journey, either for their own purpose or to share with different audiences – i.e. researchers, clinicians, nurses, healthcare learners/students, media, government decision-makers, support groups, other patients/families.
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Ambassador Storytelling Workshop, May 1, 2023 video Note – This recording is only available to participants of the workshop due to the personal nature of the conversations.
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Telling Your Personal Story: A How to Guide – This guide provides concrete strategies for writing and telling your personal story, the foundation of any advocacy effort. The guide is intended for patients, families, caregivers, and other individuals who want to create a personal story to support a specific healthcare intervention. The focus is on telling a condensed, five-minute version of your personal story for a meeting or written communication with a decision maker (e.g., your provincially elected representative). Prepared by Ryan Clarke, Advocacy Solutions for PHA Canada (2018).
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CanSOLVE CKD Storytelling for Impact - This online course offered by CanSOLVE Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is designed to guide you through the process of writing your healthcare story. As you walk through each lesson, you will have the opportunity - through the use of various interactive tools and activities - to explore why your healthcare story is so important to share. Ultimately, you will create a refined version of your story that you can share in your community to have a positive impact. You can go through the lessons at your own pace and take your time.
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Storytelling for Advocacy - Telling the stories that matter to support your health organization - This short toolkit from the US-based Health Centre Advocacy Network may be useful for volunteers to plan their advocacy storytelling from introduction to conclusion.
Storytelling for Impact
This section provides tools for volunteers to participate in the public policy process on behalf of patients, families, and caregivers. It provides an overview of key resources for advocating for policy change. Action in the policy arena can profoundly affect the daily life of patients with PH and their families/caregivers. In addition, it can raise awareness of the contributions of PHA Canada to advancing research and quality care to meet the needs of patients and families/caregivers, as well as the need to marshal more resources in this growing area.​
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An Introduction to Advocacy – This presentation was developed for PHA Canada to help advocates understand what advocacy is, why it’s important, different kinds of advocacy, and examples of effective advocacy efforts, including knowing your issues, building relationships, developing key messages, and implementing your action plan. This presentation was developed by Ryan Clarke, Advocacy Solutions for PHA Canada (2018).
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Storytelling for Advocacy - Telling the stories that matter to support your health organization - This short toolkit from the US-based Health Centre Advocacy Network may be useful for volunteers to plan their advocacy storytelling from introduction to conclusion.
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Advocating with Personal Stories: An Evaluation Toolkit - This is an evaluation tool intended for an advanced audience. It is a resource for developing evaluation methods for measuring the impact of personal stories on advocacy. Developed by the Living Proof Advocacy Project of the Wilder Foundation.
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European Patient Ambassador Program - This online, self-learning program developed in Europe introduces patients and carers to some of the basic skills and knowledge needed to represent themselves and others successfully. An excellent self-directed tool you can manage at your own pace.
Advocacy Skills Development
Patient-oriented research is about engaging patients, their caregivers, and families as partners in the research process. This engagement helps to ensure that studies focus on patient-identified priorities, which ultimately leads to better patient outcomes. At PHA Canada, we want to help transform the role of patient from a passive receptor of services to a proactive partner who helps shape health research and, as a result, health care.
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Tips for collaboration in patient engagement - from Can-SOLVE CKD Network. These tips complement the guiding principles of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research - Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research Patient Engagement Framework: inclusiveness, support, mutual respect, and co-build.
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Roles and Skills for Patient Partners in Research – from Can-SOLVE CKD Network. This is a helpful tool for Ambassadors thinking about how patients can contribute to research and clinical trials. It provides a list of the various roles and a checklist of the skills required to contribute.
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Everyone Can Do Research – A plain language guide on how to do research. This plain language toolkit on how to do research was developed by Access Alliance and is intended for use by everyone, including non-academics and people from marginalized backgrounds. The key goal of the toolkit is to make research more accessible and inclusive by showing how everyone, including marginalized people, can do research by following key steps.
Participating in Patient-Oriented Research
In the links below you will find video recordings from PHA Canada-sponsored webinars and other public recordings that might be of interest to Ambassadors.
Please note - additional recordings of PHA Canada Ambassador Trainings are confidential and may be made available to Ambassador Team members and PHA Canada staff through secure access provided directly to those individuals.
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