Welcome to Facilitating Collaborative Groups, a series of online sessions, all around the theme of facilitating group meetings. Come to all the sessions or dip in according to your level of experience and what you want to learn and practice!

Why Facilitation? What’s its Value?

Meetings are at the heart of our groups and organisations.  They are spaces where we discuss issues and get creative, where we can put our values into practice, build stronger connections with each other and make decisions that align with our shared purpose.

Facilitation is about easing a group’s path to fulfilling its shared purpose. It's more than a set of methods and tools to be applied, its a practice that fosters collaboration, a way of working that develops a culture of participation which includes all voices, experiences and perspectives, supports deep listening to the wisdom that each person has to contribute, and integrates this to inform and influence the way a group makes decisions and plans, building the group's potential for a more powerful response in the world.

We believe it’s a practice that’s essential to the transformation of our ways of organising and to the transformation of the world we’re creating for ourselves and for future generations. We also believe that anyone can become better at facilitation with practice.

These sessions will offer ideas, tools and new ways of seeing for beginners and experienced facilitators alike. The sessions will offer space to practice and to explore how new concepts might fit into your context. The sessions are intended to support a life-long practice of collaborative facilitation, hearing unheard voices and disrupting power and systemic oppression in our groups.

Who are the Sessions for?

These sessions are for people working in groups to create social, climate, ecological or economic change. They’re for people who want to support their group to make great decisions, benefit from the wisdom of all their members, and have lasting impacts with the work they have chosen to do. They’re for people who are already facilitating and want to deepen their skills

The Blocks of Sessions

Block 1: Foundational Facilitation Skills Thursdays 4th - 25th November 2021 - for more information see here

Block 2: Deepening Facilitation Skills (drop in) Mondays 24th Jan - 21st March keep reading for more information on this course

Block 3: Conflict Resilience for Facilitators Thursdays 7th April - 5th May - for more information see here

Each block consists of weekly online sessions, and in some blocks there will be a small amount of preparation work between the sessions. The sessions will be varied and participatory, with time given to learning from and practicing with others in the group.

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Block 2: Deepening Facilitation Skills 

A series of 9 online sessions (see the themes for the sessions below). These sessions are for people who have completed the basic facilitation skills block or who have some facilitation experience already. We ask that you attend sessions 1 and 2 on purpose and power, before participating in the rest of this block. You can then choose which of sessions 3 - 9 you'd like to participate in.  

Dates: Mondays 24th, 31st January, 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th February, 7th, 14th, and 21st March, from 7pm - 9pm.

session 1       24th January     Orienting around purpose and power in facilitation 1

In this 2 part session we will grapple with the question: What does it mean to facilitate? Weaving together various elements of facilitating - including tracking power and purpose, we will explore some of the trickier choice points we might be faced with as we facilitate, with room to develop your own internal compass.

session 2       31st January      Orienting around purpose and power in facilitation 2  

session 3      7th February     Tracking open loops and how to close them

Open loops are things left unresolved in meetings, or things that are un-named. We’ll explore the impacts of not tracking and attending to open loops and look at ideas for how we can close those loops, and then we’ll do some practicing.

session 4      14th February     Feelings and needs, listening and reflecting back

Facilitation requires a commitment to the vital and ongoing practice of deep listening, and reflecting back what has been heard. We’ll spend lots of time practicing.

session 5       21st February    Managing contributions 

There is never enough time in meetings to hear everything that everyone has to contribute. How do we get the right balance of hearing from people and reaching a decision in the time that we have? Why might we interrupt someone and how do we interrupt with care and skill? How do we support people who would like to contribute to do so. There will be plenty of time to practice.

session 6       28th February    Engaging with strong emotions: ways to support a group’s collective nervous system

The meeting has been tense and someone’s about to snap. And sure enough, someone raises their voice, someone else is crying, and someone else is getting up to leave the room.  Be it raised voices, tears or someone falling silent - it can be tricky to know how to respond when strong emotions are in the room, let alone when you’re facilitating a group. In this session we’ll explore what might be needed in those moments and what our options as facilitators are to support the individual and the group.

session 7       7th March    Decisionmaking Toolkit: exploring different ways to make decisions in groups

We make decisions every day, and sometimes it’s easy, and sometimes it feels like wading through a swamp, in a thick fog, with ropes pulling you in different directions. For those situations - and especially when there’s no agreed way on how to make decisions - it can be really helpful to have various ways of making decisions in groups up your sleeve. In this session we’ll take a look at some different ways of making decisions and key considerations, as well as fit in plenty of time to practice!

session 8    14th March   Strengthening capacity for naming and framing

Naming and framing are facilitator capacities that support effective meetings. Naming (verbalising something that’s happening) can help to bring something out into the open whether that’s letting people know how much time there is left before the meeting ends or that you sense that there is some tension in the room. Framing (contextualising a piece of information or decision) can help explain a process decision that you are about to take or can help the group understand what needs to happen next in the decision making process. With plenty of time to practice.

session 9      21st March      Threshold Questions

Asking questions with different thresholds has a significant impact on how people respond, with high thresholds tending to decrease discussion and low thresholds opening out the discussion and highlighting a wider range of views. This session will be an exploration of the impacts of different kinds of threshold questions and when/why we might want to use different thresholds at different times in the meeting together with the opportunity to practice formulating and asking threshold questions.

Cost: There is a sliding scale fee of £5 - £20 for each session. Please pay what you can, and if this cost is prohibitive please contact us bookings@navigate.org.uk.  We want to make these sessions as accessible as we can. If you have the means and would like to pay more, we welcome additional donations. If you’re coming on behalf of an organisation that has funding, please ask your organisation to pay for your participation, at the top end of the sliding scale.

Deadline for signing up: 7pm Sunday 23rd January 2022

To book a place on the other blocks in this series: Block 1: Foundational Facilitation Skills and Block 3: Conflict Resilience for Facilitators, please see here

If you have any questions about the course, please contact us bookings@navigate.org.uk