Center for Organizational Reform - Technical Assistance Services

Technical Assistance Services

COR provides educational opportunities for the general public, and also can bring these same helping services to specific settings to meet unique needs. In a nutshell, COR works with individuals and groups to increase their capacity to stay healthy and resilient, even in stressful times.

COR provides these technical assistance services to individuals, organizations, and inter-organizational groups. COR Associates contribute knowledge and skills in a variety of areas, including: organizational change, planning and program evaluation, communication issues, trust building and repair, group process development and repair, task facilitation, decision making and implementation, and inter-organizational collaboration. COR has more than 12 years of experience serving organizations of all kinds throughout North America.

What makes COR’s assistance so valuable? Besides years of experience, COR Associates come from across the occupational and organizational spectrum and are well-versed in research-based best practices for helping groups with specific issues. The number of qualified, available Associates results in strong matches with the needs and cultures of most groups. COR addresses clients’ particular needs, and leaves groups better able to resolve future issues independently by sharing with clients “how to do it themselves” —a process called capacity building.

Why COR's Services are Unique

Technical Assistance describes a key COR service, meaning that COR tailors its helping resources to fit a specific group or organizational need and goal. Technical assistance, as COR defines and provides it, is an educational process which includes two parts:

Engaging in a helping relationship—a partnership—with a group or organization, and

Teaching the group or organizational members what we’re doing as we engage in helping—a process known as “capacity building”.

To use a well-known analogy, COR’s technical assistance services not only help feed others who are hungry for fish, but COR teaches how to fish so that the group is better able to feed themselves the next time. The term “learning organization” is based on this educational philosophy.

Many of COR’s technical assistance services are grounded in the philosophy of process consultation, the name used by Edgar Schein (a well-known organizational scholar from MIT’s Sloan School of Management) to describe “a certain kind of philosophy about and attitude toward the process of helping individuals, groups, and organizations. It is not merely a set of techniques to be compared to and contrasted with other techniques.”

Schein is adamant about distinguishing his model of “process consultation” from what the public generally thinks of “consulting”—situations in which an outside expert is hired to come into a group and tell people the best thing to do. Instead, Schein says that, “The essential function of PC is to pass on the skills of how to diagnose and fix organizational problems so that the client is able to continue on his own to improve the organization.”

COR's Technical Assistance Services

It is in this spirit of helping relationships that COR offers the following services, available on a sliding fee scale so that ability to pay does not prevent individuals or organizations from getting needed assistance in important issues:

Peace-making: Conflict resolution and management
Assisting people with strong personalities to become effective team members
Leader crisis support
Meeting “tune-ups” and facilitation
Organizational change issues
Planning and program evaluation
Effective communication strategies
Trust building and repair
Group process development and repair
Task facilitation
Decision making and implementation
Inter-organizational collaboration

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