Supporting Groups
Facilitation for groups
We support groups at the crucial moments, when there is a complex decision, or some conflict or tension has arisen, or you want to step back and tend to your ways of working so that they’re more aligned with your values, politics, or capacity. We also offer trainings and workshops.
As facilitators we are totally committed to being on everyone’s side in the process. We also hold the purpose of the process carefully and cleanly. We are attentive to power dynamics, how experiences of marginalisation and oppression may be shaping the space, and what support might be needed for everyone to participate fully. Whatever the process we are holding, we always seek to ensure we find a way forward that genuinely works for everyone.
Our main offerings for groups are: Conflict Mediation & Transformative Justice Processes; Collaborative Decision Making Processes; and developing Living Systems. We may also be able to support other things, such as strategy processes or one-off workshops, depending on capacity.
Our Main Offerings
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Conflict is inevitable, when humans come into relationship for any time, there will be challenges. We offer support through connecting to the experience of each person, creating a safe enough container and being fully on everyone’s side, to enable the conflict to transform. We support both Conflict Mediation processes - where there is action and harm from both or many participants, and Transformative Justice Processes - where there is agreement from everyone involved that someone has acted in a way that has led to significant hurt and harm to another. More info here.
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We believe that collaborative decision making practices are an important leverage point in creating the world we want. We primarily use Convergent Facilitation (CF) - a process for getting to a genuine agreement about how to move forward with any shared practical problem or disagreement, where no-one loses or is left behind. It's particularly transformative with highly polarized issues, helping people find practical ways forward that address what really matters to everyone involved, in an efficient way. More info here.
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Living Systems is a framework for thinking about what is shaping behaviour in the group, and deliberately putting in place structures to support what you want to happen. For example, instead of trying to figure out how to handle conflict whilst you’re in conflict and finding it really hard to talk to each other, it can be game-changing to come up with something that’s consciously chosen and agreed collectively beforehand, so you have a structure to guide you when things get hard. More info here.
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We’ve historically offered open and bespoke workshops and trainings for groups, mostly on Facilitating Collaborative Groups, Responding to Conflict as group members and as facilitators. We are currently doing less of this work, as we turn our attention to other projects and to the types of processes above. However we do still run workshops sometimes, depending on capacity and alignment of strategy between us and the group requesting the workshop. You can see more about the workshops we are running here.