Facilitating Collaborative Groups

Facilitating Collaborative Groups is back. After a popular first round, we’re running this online series of drop in sessions on facilitating group meetings again.

• The series will start on 9th November and the last session of the block will be on 5th April next year.
• Come to all the sessions or dip in according to your level of experience and what you want to practice.
• Each session will involve some models, some discussion and lots of practice and each session will look at a different aspect of facilitation...
• We strongly suggest that you sign up for the Power and Systemic Oppression sessions (as these themes run throughout every aspect of life and, we feel, are particularly important for facilitators), unless you already deliver training on these themes, feel you already have a very solid understanding, or have lived experience that has given you an innate / bodily understanding.
• See below for session details

We believe we are living at a time of unprecedented and intersecting social, climate and ecological crises. We face ‘unavoidable multiple climate hazards’, increasing wealth gaps since the Covid 19 crisis and corporate monopoly power has a stranglehold on democracy. While there is so much to be grieving or discouraged by, we believe that times of crisis hold within them potential for deep and rapid change. We are seeing a rise in protest and grassroots organising across the UK and an ongoing rise in UK trade union membership.

We believe that building collective power is key to creating social change and that to build collective power we need groups that can work collaboratively together, caring for all needs and benefiting from all voices. We believe facilitation is 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!

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, put our values into practice, build stronger connections with each other and make decisions that align with our shared purpose.

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

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

Who Are the Sessions for?  And more about Navigate, the hosts

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, AND for people who want to start facilitating meetings.

If you'd like to know more about Navigate and the team members, take a look at our website 

Cost

There is a sliding scale of £5 - £20 for each session. Please pay what you can, and if this cost would stop you from coming please contact us! 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.

Session Details

Sessions will be recorded (in speaker view) and shared only with people who have signed up for the sessions. All times are in GMT/BST (UK time).

1. Getting to Know Each Other - Wed 9th Nov, 5pm-7pm: Come along to this session if you’d like some time to meet other facilitators on the course, hear about each other’s contexts and explore what you’d like to get from the course together.
2. What is Facilitation? - Wed 16th Nov, 5pm-7pm: We’ll explore some definitions of facilitation and take a look at the purpose-process-relationships triangle we believe is at the centre of the facilitator’s role. We’ll also explore some things the facilitator might need to ‘track’ or look out for, to support the group.
3. Meeting Flow and Facilitation Tools - Wed 23rd Nov, 5pm-7pm: We’ll look at planning for a meeting, designing an agenda and some of the tools you could use to support the group to have collaborative and effective meetings
4. Power and Systemic Oppression: 3 sessions - Wed 7th, Wed 14th and Wed 21st Dec, 5pm-7pm: In these 3 sessions we’ll explore ways in which power and systemic oppression can play out in groups. We’ll look at the role a facilitator can take in supporting the group to hear less heard voices, centre marginalised experiences and challenge unconscious power dynamics.
5. Naming and Framing - Wed 11th Jan, 5pm-7pm: 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 some tension in the room. Framing (contextualising a piece of information or decision) can help explain a process decision that you’re about to make or can help the group understand what needs to happen next in the decision making process. We’ll take plenty of time to practice.
6. Listening to Understand and Integrate - Wed 18th Jan, 5pm-7pm: We’ll explore listening deeply and sensing into the experience of people in our groups and ourselves. We’ll think about why this might be so important and we’ll spend lots of time practicing.
7. Managing Contributions: Interrupting and Supporting People to Contribute - Wed 25th Jan, 5pm-7pm: There often isn’t enough time in meetings to hear everything that everyone has to contribute. In this session we’ll explore how to get the right balance of hearing from people and reaching a decision in the time that we have, why we might interrupt someone and how to do that with care and skill, and how to support people who would like to contribute to do so. There will be plenty of time to practice.
8. Engaging with Strong Emotions: Ways to Support a Group’s Collective Nervous System - Wed 1st Feb, 5pm-7pm: The meeting has been tense and someone’s about to snap, 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.
9. Decision Making Toolkit: 2 sessions - Wed 8th Feb and Wed 15th Feb, 5pm-7pm: We make decisions every day. 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 these sessions 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!
10. Open Loops: How to Track and Close Them - Wed 8th Mar, 5pm-7pm: Open loops are things that are left unresolved in meetings, or things that go unnamed. We’ll explore the impacts of not tracking and attending to open loops, look at ideas for how we can close them, and then do some practicing.
11. Asking Questions and Making Requests in Groups - Wed 15th Mar, 5pm-7pm: 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. In this session we’ll explore the impacts of different kinds of questions and when/why we might want to use different thresholds at different times. We’ll practice formulating and asking threshold questions.
12. Intro to Trauma Informed Facilitation: Caring for Participants and Group Purpose - Wed 22nd Mar, 5pm-7pm: You might be starting to hear the words ‘trauma informed’ more and more. In this session we’ll explore what might be behind those words. We’ll also look at what you might want to be aware of and include in your facilitation practice
13. What Participants Can Do: How You Can Make a Big Difference in Meetings - Wed 29th Mar, 5pm-7pm: We invite you to invite the whole of your group to this session, to explore a shared understanding of what everyone can do to support effective, fun meetings. You may not be the designated facilitator for a meeting, but everyone has a role to play in working collaboratively together. If you’d like to know how best to support the facilitator, and to help the group to move forward and stay on purpose, this session is for you.
14. Watch Us Facilitate - Wed 5th Apr, 5pm-7pm: In this session we will demonstrate facilitating a meeting and explore some of the challenges for a facilitator and possible ways forward. There’ll be ‘time outs’ to think more about what’s happening at different moments and ask questions
    
    Practice Sessions
    We're offering three practice sessions throughout the course. While all the sessions have practical elements in them, the practice sessions are pure practice spaces with no new content. There will be exercises and scenarios that pertain to the content covered so far, and you'll have a choice about how to engage and what practices to participate in. The sessions are on:
    Practice Session 1 - Fri 16th Dec, 5pm-7pm
    Practice Session 2 - Fri 24th Feb, 5pm-7pm
    Practice Session 3 - Fri 31st Mar, 5pm-7pm
    
    

Invitations

• Like most things, the more you’re able to put in, the more you gain. We encourage you to facilitate as many meetings as you can between the sessions, and to experiment with new ideas and skills, as this will support you to embed learning.
• If its possible, we’d suggest booking with at least 1 other person from your group/community, as we believe this will support you to use and apply what you’ve learned more effectively when you go back to your group.
• If you have missed sessions you would have liked to attend, please do drop us a line.

Contact

Please contact us if you have any questions about the course, or any concerns about your participation: bookings @ navigate.org.uk

We had a great time running this series earlier in the year and we’re really looking forward to doing it again!

The Navigate Team