No Small Change – Toolkit 4: Some ideas for icebreakers

It’s a good idea to start a workshop with some kind of introduction to everyone in the group. There are several reasons for doing this:

- Common courtesy and making sure everyone feels welcome- Ensure that everyone knows who everyone is. Make sure people know who the

organisers and facilitators are too!- Sets a precedent for everyone in the room to speak.

How you choose to do this will depend on who the group is made up of, how well they know each other, and how much time you have. You will also need to be sensitive to individual personalities and characters in the group – some people may find these type of activities very stressful so choose carefully and make sure people can opt out if they want to.

Quick Exercises

Name Game

A quick way to remember names is to get people to go round in a circle introducing themselves. You can liven this up by making each person also introduce the person next to them. To make it really challenging you can get people to introduce everyone that has gone before them, so the last person has to remember everyone in the group’s name e.g my name is Gary and this is Freda, this is Clare, etc., etc.

Speedy Interview

Give people two minutes to speak to the person next to them and find out something interesting about them. Then go round the circle and get everyone to introduce the person they were talking to (as opposed to introducing themselves!) If people are sitting next to people they already know, ask them to move around the room and find someone they don’t know.

Exercises that involve the CC they are involved in

You can try and bring in the CC to the warm up activity.

Why, What, How?

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You could just go round the room and ask people to say their name and the answer to a question about the CC. So, you could ask people why they got involved in the CC, what their most memorable experience has been, how long they have been involved, etc.

Line Up

A more interactive way of doing the previous exercise is to get people to answer a question by lining up in order. So, you could ask people how long they have been involved with the CC and ask the person who has been involved the longest to stand at one side of the room and the shortest the other. Other ideas are where people live in relation to the CC. You can of course ask questions not related to the currency. To make it more difficult ask people not to talk to each other while they are doing the line up.

More Active Games

These games require a bit of space and participants who are mobile and keen.

Human Chaos

This game needs a reasonably large group of people (upwards of 15) to work. Start off in a circle. Get everyone to choose two other people in the group without telling them who they are. Then ask people to go and stand in the middle of these two people and to try and stay in the middle of these two people. This game makes sense as soon as you start doing it because everyone is chasing after different people.

Clothes Peg Tag

Give everyone at least one clothes peg (the more the better) and challenge them to get rid of all of their pegs onto other participants in the group without them noticing. You might want to give them one of the earlier activities to do at the same time. At the end of the warm up you can see who has unintentionally gathered the most clothes pegs.

Longer Games

The next activities take a bit longer to do, but if you have a full day workshop it might be worth spending the time.

Who is it?

You can give the group a list of questions that they have to find the answer to. This could be things to do with the currency project or random questions. People then have

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to go round the room and find out the answers. It can be more fun if the answers to the questions are subjective so there can be many different answers.

Some example questions:

Who has been involved in the CC for longest? Who travelled the furthest to get to the workshop today? How many people have a pet? How many people have birthdays in March? How many people ate cereal for breakfast today? Who knows what 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' is a fear of?

(see the Knox guide for the answer!)

This is based on an exercise from the Knox, G, 40 Icebreakers for Small Groups, http://insight.typepad.co.uk/40_icebreakers_for_small_groups.pdf

Wants and Offers

You could ask people to fill in typical time banking ‘wants’ and ‘offers’ cards at the beginning of a session. If the currency you are running is a time bank then people will probably be familiar with this sort of exercise and you can pin them up on a wall and invite people to take a look at them over the course of the day. This gives people a change to think about anything they might want support from of other people in the group.

If the currency isn’t a time bank and participants are not used to thinking about trading skills you could do it as an exercise that won’t necessarily result in trade but as a way of people getting to know each other. So, you could give people cards where they write down three things they want help with and three things they can offer help with. You can then give people 10 to 15 minutes to go round the room finding people to trade with. Even in this is just done as a hypothetical exercise you may find that people do end up swapping skills.

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