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Compendium of useful, purposeful
introduction/warm-up/icebreaker exercises
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These slides are a compendium of exercises that FSG project teams have used with
both working groups and steering committees for a collective impact effort focused on
childhood obesity
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Each slide has an exercise, and the headline describes how to use it
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While these slides are specific to childhood obesity, they can easily be adapted for any
social issue
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Feel free to contact Erin White (erin.white@fsg.org) with questions on these slides
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© 2015 FSG
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Introductions: for the first-time meeting of a new group
1. Name, Title, Organization
2. What does your organization do? (Explain as if to someone you
just met sitting next to you on a plane).
3. How does your work touch childhood obesity?
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© 2015 FSG
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Introductions: for the first-time meeting of a new group
Exercise Instructions:
Why is childhood obesity important to you?
• Find a partner. If you have previously been involved in this collective impact initiative,
please find someone who is new today
• Discuss the question with your partner. Be sure to note your partner’s responses
• Introduce you partner to the group. In one minute or less, introduce your partner to
the group and explain why childhood obesity is important to him or her
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© 2015 FSG
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Introductions: Getting people to “go deep” in knowing each other
• Find a partner you don’t know well. Ask,
• What do you do?
• Why is it important to you?
• Hmmm, why is that important to you?
• Keep asking, “Why is that important to
you? why…” until you make a discovery
about the fundamental purpose behind why
your partner’s work is important.
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: helping stakeholder see where they fit within
the broad issue being addressed by the initiative
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Write the name of your organization in BIG LETTERS on a sheet of paper in
front of you, like this:
MY
ORGANIZATION
If you work for multiple organizations, choose one. If you work for yourself,
choose the organization with which you are most closely affiliated
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Consider the various ways your organization touches the childhood obesity
issue, and whether your organization’s influence is more focused on healthy
eating, physical activity, or both
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Line up across the front of the room on a spectrum relative to others based on
your organization’s influence
Physical
Activity
Equally
influencing both
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Healthy
Eating
© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: for early meetings with a new group
Tell me about a time when you felt
particularly proud of the impact you made
on health care quality through your work
Instructions
1. Find a partner who you don’t already know
2. Discuss the question with a partner. Be sure to note your partner’s response.
(~ 4 min)
3. Share your partner’s story with the group (~ 1 min each)
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: for early meetings with a new group
AND to combat the “this is too hard for us to work on” mentality
• Find a partner you do not know well.
• Tell a story about a time when you worked on
challenge with others and you are proud of
what you accomplished.
• What is the story and what made the success
possible?
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Warm-up exercise: Using a site visit as a way to connect as a group
and with the work
Family Clinic Tour
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For those of you who participated in the tour, what reflections or reactions did
you have?
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What did you see/hear that makes you think about our work?
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Warm-up exercise: to use after months of a group meeting
OR if the group has already been meeting for awhile
1. Think of a time in the development of the collective impact
initiative that you remember feeling excited, inspired, and very
proud of what was happening.
»
»
»
»
What was the situation?
Who was there?
What was your role?
What was the core factor that made this experience possible
and so meaningful?
2. Tell your partner a story about this experience.
3. Report out to the group on what you heard and how we might
use that experience guide our future work together.
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: Using homework reading
Separate into two groups
1. What did you read?
2. What did you learn from the reading? What was most
surprising?
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Research & Publications:
http://www.rwjf.org/en/about-rwjf/program-areas/childhood-obesity.html
• White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report:
http://www.letsmove.gov/white-house-task-force-childhood-obesity-reportpresident
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: emphasizes importance of relationships in CI
AND gets people focused on connection between day jobs and CI
What connections emerged during or after
our last meeting?
•
Did you:
–
–
–
Meet someone you’ve been meaning to meet?
Have a “spark” connection?
Identify an opportunity to work with someone new?
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Anytime exercise: to make connections between day jobs and the CI
effort AND to help people see value in coming to meetings
Two-Minute Drill
• Approach: Individual participants share something top of mind for them—
either something they’re excited about, or struggling with, or a new update
about the work
• Purpose: Learn from one another and make connections that might not
happen otherwise, by putting rigor and structure around those connections
• Benefits: Helps to reinforce heightened level of vigilance that enables
participants to collectively see and respond to opportunities that would
otherwise have been missed
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: to focus or re-focus on systems level
Collective Impact Initiative
Healthy Eating Working Group
Icebreaker (25 minutes)
1. Before the meeting, mark four stations around the room (flip chart paper). Label the stations
“individual,” “social,” “food environments,” “food marketing and labeling” and “policy.”
2. Divide the group into 3 small groups.
3. 3 min: The facilitator will lay the foundation for the icebreaker and explain the activity.
4. 5min: While in small groups, have each person start by sharing what they ate yesterday and why they
chose those foods (key influencers)?
5. 12min: Have each small group discuss which of the influences (stations) they think has the greatest
effect on what we eat. They must ultimately select one influence as having the greatest effect. If you
wanted to change peoples’ eating behavior, on which influence would you target your intervention?
6. 2min: Each group will take turns standing by the station (flip chart paper) that most reflects their
opinions. Ask one volunteer from each group to explain their responses.
7. Recap and link to overall strategies/goals of WG
Station #1
Individual
Station #2
Social
Station #3
Food environments
Hunger
Taste
Income
Knowledge
Emotions
Health conditions
Eating behaviors
of:
- Friends
- Family
- Coworkers
- peers
Cost and
Availability of foods
in:
- Homes
- Schools
- Restaurants
- Stores
- Communities
Values:
- nutrition
- convenience
- environment
- public health
- Social justice
- animal welfare
Access:
- public transit
- sidewalks
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Station #4
Food marketing
and labeling
Advertisements:
- billboards
- television
- internet
- magazines
- newspapers
Station #5
Food & agricultural
policy
food and nutrition
assistance
Labels:
- nutrition
- organic
- fair trade
Regulations on
marketing
Farm subsidies
Support for organic
© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: to re-focus on process of CI / OR get a sense of
folks’ understanding of CI and excitement about process
• What makes this meeting different from others
you attend?
• Write down 1-2 ideas you have in mind (2 mins)
• We’ll discuss our reflections as a group (5 mins)
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up exercise: connecting strategies to group members’ own
experiences
Form pairs and share a time when you’ve
participated in physical activity as a part of a
group or social network – what was the
benefit of this experience?
We’ll ask for 3-4 volunteers to share their
partner’s story
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© 2015 FSG
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Warm-up: when the community gets bad press for the issue that is
the focus of the CI effort
• [City X] was recently in the news for having poor outcomes on the
issue we care about: [insert link to article]
• Spend 5 minutes reading the article
• In groups of 2-3 discuss your impression of the article (10 minutes)
– In what ways were the statements about our city not true?
– In what ways were these statements generalizations or more
“myths”?
– In your opinion, what needs to be done to dispel the myths and
highlight the truths about our city?
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© 2015 FSG