Participants
The Spirit of Life program is designed for adult participants age 18 and up. The workshops are equally suitable for a congregation's first-time visitors and its long-time members. To adapt a workshop for use with high school youth, leaders may need to revise some activities to make their concepts more concrete and less abstract.Workshops can accommodate any number of participants, with six participants an ideal minimum. If you have six or more participants, you will be able to divide your group into the pairs or triads that several activities require.
For a group of 30 or more participants, leaders will need to modify activities that involve small group presentations to the entire group. Co-leaders can split the whole group in half. In separate meeting spaces, each co-leader leads the activity for his/her half of the group. The two, separate sets of small groups can then present simultaneously, each to their own half of the whole. Workshops with more than 60 participants will require further adaptation of some activities, including expansion of the leadership team.
Integrating All Participants
Nearly every activity plan in the Spirit of Life curriculum includes a section called "All Participants." This section offers tips on how to make the activity inclusive for all participants and accessible for people with particular cognitive, learning, and physical disabilities.The tips are not exhaustive. You may find they do not fully equip you to create a welcoming, accessible space for all of your participants. The Unitarian Universalist Association website offers a wealth of information about accessibility for persons with disabilities—information that goes well beyond the recommendations listed in the All Participants section of this curriculum. Visit the UUA.org Leaders Library and search the keyword "accessibility."
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
