Affirming  •  Welcoming  •  Engaging

Affirming, Welcoming, Engaging (AWE) Plan of Action

A targeted process for communities who want to know why people are not connecting — and what to do about it.

Every Catholic community has ripples. At the centre are the people who do everything — they are at every meeting, on every committee, at every Mass. Move outward and the ripples get wider and quieter, until you reach people who are registered, who come, and who have never once been asked for anything.

Most communities never reach past the first ripple. Not from indifference — nobody planned it that way. It simply never became anyone’s job.

The AWE Plan of Action makes it someone’s job. It surfaces what is genuinely working in your community, identifies the specific barriers keeping people at a distance, and produces actionable strategies for deepening connection — with the people you already have, and with the people who have not arrived yet.

Belonging leads to believing. This is the process built entirely around that sentence.

Three words, in order

The sequence is not decorative. A community that tries to engage people it has never affirmed will find very few takers.

Affirming

Naming what is already good, and telling people so.

Communities under pressure develop a habit of talking about themselves in terms of what is missing. Affirming is the discipline of finding what is working — the ministries that thrive, the volunteers who never stop, the things families actually love — and saying it out loud, specifically, to the people responsible.

Welcoming

Removing what stands between a person and belonging.

Most barriers are invisible from the inside. The unmarked door. The bulletin written for people who already know the acronyms. The ministry that has met on the same night for twenty years. The new family nobody spoke to. AWE finds them by asking the people who experienced them.

Engaging

The personal invitation, extended on purpose.

Engagement is not a bulletin notice. It is a named person asking a named person to do a specific thing, because they were thought of. AWE builds the structures that make that ordinary rather than exceptional — and assigns the people responsible for it.

How the Process Runs

1. The Executive Committee and the AWE Workshop

As with every ISPD process, a small Executive Committee forms first — the people who can decide and who will still be here afterward.

Then we teach. The AWE Workshop is delivered to your leadership and ministry heads, and it does something specific: it gives a community shared language for talking about belonging. Without that vocabulary, conversations about engagement tend to circle around blame — who is not showing up, who is not helping. With it, the conversation becomes about structures, which is where the actual problem usually lives.

We assess your present engagement efforts and listen widely — through interviews, and through a community-wide survey that reaches beyond the people who normally answer.

Where it fits, we use the Ultimate Question Survey: how likely are you to recommend this community to your family, friends, and colleagues? It measures advocacy rather than satisfaction, which is the more useful thing to know. People can be perfectly content and still never invite anyone.

The findings become Challenges — each written as a question the community has to answer, and each grounded in something a real person said.

This is the part communities find uncomfortable and valuable in roughly equal measure. Barriers to belonging are almost always invisible to the people closest to the centre, because those people stopped experiencing them years ago.

A team drawn from across the community — deliberately including people from the outer ripples — works the Challenges into strategic solutions in SMART form: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-driven.

Not “be more welcoming.” Rather: who does what, by when, and how we will know it happened.

You receive a written AWE Plan of Action — what is working and worth protecting, the barriers identified, the prioritized strategies, and recommendations with named owners and timelines.

Then we help stand up the teams that carry it, because a plan about belonging that nobody owns is simply another document about belonging.

AWE Plan of Action — building a culture of belonging | ISPD

AWE is the right process when

  • Registrations hold steady but participation quietly does not
  • New families or new parishioners arrive and never quite land
  • The same people carry everything and recruiting has stopped working
  • You suspect there are barriers you can no longer see from the inside
  • Volunteers sign up once and are not seen again
  • Your community is welcoming to those who already know how it works

Consider another process if…

You need direction for the whole parish. A Long-Range Pastoral Plan covers belonging as one pillar among four, over a longer horizon.

The whole school needs a plan. That is a Strategic Growth Plan.

Giving is the presenting problem. A Total Stewardship Plan addresses prayer, ministry, and finance across a full liturgical year.

Enrollment is the presenting problem. See advancement and enrollment planning.

AWE is the focused option — narrower than any of these, and pointed at one question: why are people not connecting, and what will we do about it?

Questions leaders ask us

What does AWE stand for?

Affirming, Welcoming, and Engaging — the three movements of the process, in that order.

Affirming names what is already good and says so. Welcoming removes the barriers standing between a person and belonging. Engaging extends the personal invitation, on purpose and to specific people.

The order matters. A community that tries to engage people it has never affirmed will find very few takers.

Both, and it is worth knowing the difference.

The AWE Workshop is a session ISPD delivers inside our larger planning processes — part of the education phase in a Long-Range Pastoral Plan or a Strategic Growth Plan.

The AWE Plan of Action is a full engagement in its own right: assessment, listening, named barriers, strategic solutions, and a written plan with owners and timelines. This page describes the Plan.

Either. The barriers differ — a parish is usually thinking about parishioners who have drifted and newcomers who never connected; a school is usually thinking about families who enroll and never engage, and alumni who disappeared at graduation — but the process is the same, and so is the underlying question.

A communications plan changes what you say. AWE changes what people experience.

Better communication cannot fix a community where the new family sat alone for three Sundays, or where the volunteer who signed up was never called. Those are structural problems, and no amount of messaging solves them. AWE finds them and assigns someone to fix them.

A written AWE Plan of Action: what is working and worth protecting, the specific barriers your own people identified, prioritized strategic solutions in SMART form, and implementation recommendations with named owners and timelines.

And a shared vocabulary. Communities routinely tell us the most durable outcome was that leadership finally had language for a problem they had felt for years without being able to name.

Let’s Make Things Happen!

Belonging leads to believing. Let’s find out who in your community has not been asked yet.
Contact us today to learn more.

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